Question 6

• Canon XHAI HD camera
• Tripod
• Adobe Premiere
• Tracking Pad

Although I did have experience using this type of camera before – such as in class and in the preliminary task – I feel that this extra experience with the camera has actually taught me some new skills. For example, we used some more experimental shots (such as panning up and down rather than just side to side, the low angle shot from the table where Ashley throws the paper ball and the tracking over the shoulder shot when he’s walking to school) that we hadn’t tried beforehand, but felt much more confident with by the end of filming. Also, although we hadn’t had experience with the track pads before, we were really determined to use him for the tracking over the shoulder shot. So, after some practice before shooting and on the day of shooting when we took a break, we were able to get the shot done rather successfully within a few takes.

The editing software we used in post-production was Adobe Premiere. The first thing we had to do was to plug in our Lacie (USB drive) and to use a fire wire to connect our camera to the computer. We were then able to digitise our tapes and save them onto the Lacie, and then we were ready to start editing. We then basically went through the rushes, deleting the worst takes of each different shot, and then we began to splice and rearrange etc. on the assembly line. We used this because it is a simple, yet sophisticated editing software. This meant we were able to get the work done to a good quality but were still able to understand the software.

During filming we had to keep in mind the rule of thirds, the 180-degree rule, continuity and match on action. The 180-degree rule is a basic guideline that states that two characters in the same scene should always have the same left and right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line, and it the two characters swap places. This is to be avoided if possible, because it can ruin the flow of continuity. The rule of thirds is the way in which you need to frame shots so they look aesthetically pleasing to the eye. You do this by imagining that the LCD screen is divided into thirds both horizontally and vertically, and then line up different main points of your shot accordingly. Continuity is the idea that a series of shots should be physically continuous, as if the camera simply changed angles in the course of a single event, and so as you cut between the different shots the scene as a whole still flows cohesively. Match on action is an editing technique where the editor cuts from one shot to another view that matches the first shot's action. For example, If someone is drinking a can of coke in a mid shot, then goes to put it down and it cuts to a close up of the can, the editing of the two together should look like one continuous movement. It links to continuity in the way that the scene it is used in still needs to look cohesive.

 

We kept the rule of thirds in mind by watching the footage through the camera’s LCD to ensure the shot looked aesthetically pleasing, and re-shooting and re-framing the scene if it didn’t. We dealt with continuity by doing total shots in each location; so that we could walk away sure we had enough footage to make a part of the opening sequence (such as where Ashley is home after school, and we have one shot of him walking towards a lamp, then a cut away to him turning it off). We kept continuity and match on action in mind with the help of total shots (where each scene is filmed in full from beginning to end in each different camera angle), which meant in editing we simply needed to cut down the clips (using the razor tool) until the cut between the two looked natural. The 180 degree rule isn’t something we had to consider too much since we only had one main character for our opening and that the majority of the shots of him we taken from the front. However, if we had not been paying attention in the mirror shots, we could have ruined to effect of it we did cross the line.

In terms of editing, I definitely had to use more techniques in this task than I did in the prelim. For example, for the parts where Ashley was standing in the hall with people walking past him, we needed to speed it up by 900% (and remove the ‘frame blend’) and then add on the ‘ghosting’ effect to make it seem like everyone was blurring past him and give the scene a more eerie look. Also, this was my first time changing the colour filters and balance on a film, which we used in ours to make the whole thing look a bit more dramatic. When making the credits we were able to use the basic skills we had learnt (which pretty much extended about as far as changing the font and being able to type the actual text), but had to learn a lot along the way too, such as adding in transitions and fades. In our credits we actually layered up 2 sets of each piece of text so that we could have one sliding out faintly behind the other, relating to our film title of ‘Disconnect’.

In terms of problems, the only real issue we faced while filming was trying to do an aerial shot we had planned, because we found that the camera was too heavy to keep still. We remedied the situation however by doing some other creative shots, so we still had something to replace it with (ultimately we replaced it with the Point of View shot used at the beginning of our sequence).