DIGI TECHS

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

During this year and the creation of my film, review page, and poster, I have used the most efficient, simple but effective technological methods and techniques.
To film my film, I used this digital camera which was light and small, so good for taking abroad. It was capable of all standard uses of a digital camera: and because I was filming in a 60s style, I didn’t need too many modern, up to date technological capabilities in the camera, as I wasn’t going to attempt any difficult, modern style camera shots. Of course, the advantage of using a digital camera was that it was simple to transfer the filmed footage onto a computer for editing purposes.
This method of filming greatly contrasted to what I used at the start of the year – as you can see in my pitch, I used Apple’s photo booth software to film myself. This is very basic and very restrictive – as of course the camera is part of the computer hardware.
For editing I used the software Imovie. I used a manual to find out how to remove the sound from footage so I could create my own soundtrack using copyright free sound downloads from the software Itunes , recorded sounds using a microphone – mainly for voice-overs, and sounds that come with the software: Garageband programme. I also learnt how to change colour/contrast levels as the lighting on location wasn’t how I envisaged it – I mainly used this tool to brighten the picture .
During editing, I hadn’t yet created a soundtrack. So I added ‘A fistful of dollars’ main theme into Imovie so I could have a sense of how the soundtrack I would make might work with the picture. I couldn’t use this soundtrack though as it was copyrighted and I wanted to make my own one.
For audience feedback, I used the camera, questionnaires created on the software Microsoft word, but also the internet, specifically the social networking website Facebook. This meant I could access a wide audience very quickly, to find out what they thought about the film.
I also uploaded it to youtube.com, as it shows statistics on who views the video .
For my poster, I used the design software photoshop, specifically the colour overlay tool, which was useful for creating the silhouette effect . I downloaded a font from the uncopyright font website DAFONT.com because they had a larger selection of fonts than photoshop, and more that were suitable.
I took stills for my review page and poster, from my film, using cmd.shift.4. I also created a slideshow out of my storyboard, which I coloured using photoshop. I took the colours using the eyedropper tool from my location shoot, to find out what my storyboard might look like after it was filmed.