There were the match on action practice...
... the character crossover...
... and the mise-en-scene opening.
So, how have these all lead to the opening of "Fast Forward"?
First off, the editing is much, MUCH better. Back in the "Wedding Cancellation" and "Backstabber", the editing was very choppy, and seemed very amateur, especially with the first of the two examples given. Dialogue randomly cut in the middle of a sentence, and there wasn't a good flow to it. The "Backstabber" opening was slightly better (especially considering it was done in the earliest hours of the morning because the person I was working with was no help at all), but non-digetic sound was inconsistent and repeated in a way that was noticeable. "Ghosts" was edited by both Megan and myself, but it was probably the best editing out of the three tasks above. There really wasn't anything to fault! :)
There were issues that were carried through all three tasks though, such as
- Shaky camera, due to lack of compatible tripods
- Unwanted background noises
- Wind / other people interfering with dialogue recording
Stuff like that.
So, when Emily and I were making the opening of "Fast Forward", how did we try and prevent the issues that the preliminary tasks had?
First off, we got a tripod! We found a tripod that would actually work with and correctly / sturdily hold our camera! That meant that quite a few of the shots are sturdy, whether they made it into the final cut or not. One specific one I can think of is of Zac (Isaac) skating down a hill, and the camera is completely still when compared to the other shots of him skateboarding.
A lot of the other shots were done with one of us holding the camera, but we made sure to hold it in a way that was comfortable, and that we could hold for a long time without twitching, shaking, etc.
Unwanted background noises was both difficult and easy to solve. At first, we thought we could just get a microphone to record the audio and use one of those fancy poles to hold the microphone, but then we realised... why don't we just film somewhere relatively quiet? There was no forest of trees rustling in the wind (see the second half of "Ghosts"), and we learnt from "Backstabber" that filming somewhere quieter resulted in better sounding dialogue and sound effects.
So, we only really filmed where there was very little to no people around, such as in the scene where Zac gets on the skateboard for the first time in the opening, there was no-one around except Emily, Isaac and me.
The dialogue was a fairly easy work-around. We knew that, while we were able to film in mostly quiet areas, we couldn't find anywhere in Castle Mall that was quiet enough to film in (especially after the evacuation incident). So, when we did have scenes in the Castle Mall, we did a second recording purely for the audio, by having the microphone closer to Isaac's face so that it is the main aspect of the recording.
The editing was also bumped up a notch! I was the one who did all the editing while Emily started off her evaluation questions, which was perfectly fine with me :D
I used some of the techniques I had learnt while making the video diary and my Art Multimedia coursework, including
- How to put in images and edit them to fit the video itself
- How to improve sound effects and when the right time to put them is
- How to speed up audio, change it's pitch, etc.
- How to put in titles, which we used for the time cards and the credits (most of which were made up.)
- Fading video in and out, in both black and white.
- Proper audio mixing for when the audio is the main focus and when it's not
Now, I think that's a pretty good list of things to improve on from the beginning of the academic year :D
I believe that the variety of shots is slightly upped from the preliminary tasks, but the newer interesting shots are used in place of some interesting shots from the preliminary tasks. For example, the most interesting shot (in my opinion) of all the three preliminary tasks above, was from "Backstabber". It was after James's character challenged Charlie's character, and the shot of Charlie pulling the knife out of his pocket, and having it shine and sheen to the camera. That was what I think was the most interesting shot was, and while we don't have anything "worm eye view" like that in Fast Forward, we do have a similar shot of an item coming out in a shot that focuses only on that; the shot in which Zac flips out the skateboard onto the floor.
In a nutshell, we learnt a lot of how to improve the intro from the preliminary tasks. Most of it was on how to make the audio and video higher quality. The editing is much better than before, and the shots, while different to the preliminary shots, are just as, maybe even more, interesting.
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