Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is a software for creating video compositions, animations and special effects. After Effects is perfectly capable of producing high-quality compositions for television programs, commercials and even feature films. To use After Effects you would need to be very imaginative as it is a creative tool, which allows you to create special effects in loads of different ways you could ever imagine.

"After effects has taken my career in Video to a whole new level. The entire creative suites have pushed my production levels to new heights and have made MANY clients very happy!Thanks Adobe for keeping the Creatives in mind!" (BobConrad, 2014)

We had a tutorial with John and learnt the basics of keying and creating titles. Green screening is a very popular technique used to change the background to any exotic location or a fantasy world. In order to get the green screening to look decent, during production you would need to use a high resolution camera and making sure that the green screen is lit evenly with no shadows.

We learnt about the matte layers and how much difference the white and blacks make. A matte is a layer that defines the transparent areas of that layer or another layer. White defines opaque areas, and black defines transparent areas. We also learnt about motion tracking when the camera is moving and to make it look more realistic, you would need to use tracking motion and move the tracking point to one of the markers on the green screen and analyse forward. To get rid of the markers you would need to apply a mask to the markers and then invert the mask.

BobConrad. (2014). Adobe After Effects CC / Reviews. Available: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/aftereffects/reviews.html. Last accessed 26th March 2014.

'My Precious Folk Culture' documentary

I got given the role of sound operator for Mikela and we filmed in a Sixth Form Colllege on a weekend, where Albanian children go for dancing lessons and a few academic subjects. This documentary is about the Albanian language and lifestyle and if being brought up in England has any affect on their ethnic background or culture.

I was working with Mikela as the director and Charles Gyamfi as the camera operator, I used a boom microphone and a zoom recorder to capture sound of the interviews and the music of when they were dancing.

We had a few problems at first because the Mikela being the director did not bring any SD cards or batteries so we had to make a trip to the nearest store that sold them, which wasted a lot of time. In my previous short projects that I have been part of the director had always provided me with batteries and SD cards unless they told me to bring my own. The day before I even asked Mikela if she needed me to bring any SD cards or batteries and she said that she would provide them. After buying the SD card and batteries and missing the important half of the sound, which was the dancing lesson but luckily we still caught it on camera, just no sound but we carried on with the interviews once we got the sound equipment sorted out. We were also running out of time as the lessons had finished and the parents were outside ready to pick up their children, so we had to rush things a bit.

Apart from that major problem everything else went alright, I managed to capture all the sound for the interviews and Mikela had to use sound that was captured from the camera. 

Next time I will just bring my own batteries and SD cards, just in case because we can't always keep buying new SD cards and batteries as it is very time consuming.

Pro Tools Tutorial.

We had a Avid Pro Tools tutorial and learnt about the basics of using this digital audio work station. Pro Tools is a very popular software used for music and also post-production, it is a multi-track software-based digital recording and editing system. Allowing you to be as creative as you possibly can, creating different sound effects and mixing sound into certain films and television programmes.

"The first-generation Pro Tools system was released in 1991, supporting four tracks of audio. Eventually, using additional cards and interfaces, these Pro Tools systems expanded to support up to 16 tracks of simultaneous recording and playback." (Cook, 2013)

The edit window is where you would do all the editing by cutting, trimming, moving, copying or deleting the audio files. So once you edit an audio file by trimming it and so on, there is always a way to get back to the original audio file. 

If you have recorded or get given recordings to edit from then you can import them into Pro Tools and use the drag and drop onto the tracks or drag the audio from the clip list.

The zoom, which is the magnifying glass tool that allows you to obviously zoom in and out of the certain audio files to allow you to cut as close and accurate as possible, there is also a different way to zoom into the parts where you would like to edit from by clicking and dragging to and from the certain parts and it will automatically zoom in to make your changes to. There are also certain shortcuts on the keyboard to use certain tools.

There are four different types of editing modes; Slip, shuffle, spot and grid and all four do different things. 

Slip is the main mode that you would want to edit in most of your footage from as it allows you to edit and move selected parts where ever you'd wish to and if you delete certain parts it would leave a gap in it.

Shuffle is another type of editing mode when you drag and drop audio files into the timeline then it snaps to the nearest audio clips, leaving no gaps and it does not allow overlapping either.

Spot mode allows you to only move it to specific time locations within the time line. So a box with pop up asking you to sync it with the beginning and the end of the clip.

The last editing mode is grid which is mainly used for musical applications and works like "snap to grid"

Cook, F. (2013). Pro Tools 101 an Introduction to Pro Tools 10. Boston, Mass: Course Technology PTR.

Recreating Lighting in Memento

For the lighting exercise project we had to recreate the first three black and white scenes from either 'The Godfather' or 'Memento.' Our group decided to do it on 'Memento' as the scenes are more interesting and one of our friends decided to help us act in the film and also let us use his bedroom as the set, which was the closest we could get to looking like the motel room in 'Memento.'

My main role for the exercise was lighting and I used 2 redhead lights and a dedolight lighting kit, as this was a lighting exercise we wanted to make sure we got the lighting as close as possible to match the scenes in 'Memento.' This was my first time working on location lighting and I really enjoyed working with these lights even though it was a small room, so it was difficult to work with trying to find space to put the lights.

The scenes that we had to recreate were your typical film noir type of scenes as the scenes were dark dramatic and also filmed in black and white to show us the contrast between the story. The black and white sequences proceed in chronological order where as the colour sequences proceed in reverse chronological order.

"Film noir is a term introduced in the 1940s by French critics Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier. The French word "noir" translates to "black" or "dark," and film noir describes a style of filmmaking rather than an actual film genre." (Crawford 2012)

The only problems we encountered was the amount of daylight that was coming in from outside made the room too bright and to fix that we had to get towels and blankets to try and block out as much light as we possibly could. There was also a problem with the lens as the zoom was very shaky but next time when we are out on a shoot again, I would make sure that the weather is suitable for the filming and again I check all the equipment before we go ahead and shoot.

Crawford, S. (2012, February 28). "5 Film Noir Photography Tips. Retrieved March 15, 2014, from HowStuffWorks.com: http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cameras-photography/tips/5-film-noir-photography-tips.htm

'Called To Care' documentary

I had been asked by Megan Street and Grace Kelly to help them with another one of their projects for their Documentary module. At first I was still undecided because of financial issues, it costs a lot to travel to Loughborough but they agreed to help me with my funding, as I was helping them with their shoot. This documentary was basically about the life of a street pastor and what it is like to do this voluntary job. So we went out with our kit on a Saturday night in the town following the pastors with the cameras and microphones.

During the weekend shoot I had to record a few interviews and just following Megan's camera to get sound of interviews of people out and about in the town, using the boom pole and mic and a zoom H4N kit, which was a pain to carry around town. As we were outside I needed to put the windshield on the microphone but it wasn't windy so I would have the recording level on high. This time we bought duracell batteries, as they are a well known branding name and they lasted quite a long time, which was good so we did not have to change them all the time. The major problem I encountered whilst we were shooting was that the XLR cable was faulty and every time I move the wire slightly it cuts the sound completely. I recorded the interviews of the street pastors before we went out into the town, to try and get around the faulty XLR cable I had to use the stereo microphones, which were attached on top of the zoom H4N kit. Luckily the weather was not too windy, which meant I could still record some sound and also Grace was using her DSLR with a rode microphone attached to it, so hopefully she can pick up the sound that I couldn't on mine.

"Shooting out of town always brings complications to the production. Travelling with equipment has to be planned out and arrangements have to be made well in advance for the crew." (Cartwright S, 1996)

The one thing that I would check next time is whether the kit is all there and working as some wires and technology wears out over time.

Cartwright S (1996). Preproduction Planning for Video, Film, and Multimedia. Boston: Focal Press.