How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning, and evaluation stages?
The different media technologies we used in these stages include:
- Final Cut Pro 7
- Final Cut Pro 10
- YouTube
Before production started, we decided that for our planning stage we create an animated storyboard by adding frames from the storyboard and putting them in time with the music in Final Cut Pro 7. The storyboard let us picture the on-beat cuts that we were going to use in our production to fit with the music.
During post-production, we looked at the intro to the video, where the character sprints towards the calendar (0:34 in the video). We decided to speed up this shot to make it seem more comical. In Final Cut Pro 10 we sped up the shot to about 150% speed which made the run look obviously sped up for comedic purpose. This decision was made to separate this video from reality, as this is done throughout almost the whole video.
Another thing we noticed during post-production was that the opening shots seemed eerily silent. The solution for this was to add diegetic sounds of birds chirping (from 0:00 to 0:27) to make the scene sound more alive. We got the sound clip from a YouTube video which we then put on YouTube-mp3.org to make it into an audio file.
We also had to get the sound of birds chirping fade out as the music faded in. Final Cut Pro 10 let us do that, as you can change how long the audio fades out for (e.g. end instantly or fade out over a long time).
Another example of diegetic sound used in our video was at 1:48 where the character screams. This was the only sound recorded with the camera that we kept. While editing, we thought that the scream was too loud and stood out too much in the video. At first, we tried removing the scream, but this felt weird, as the character looked like he was screaming but no sound was being made. We all believed that the absence of diegetic sound seemed strange and the character's obvious discomfort should be accompanied by the scream. Ultimately, we decided to lower the volume of the scream significantly so it wouldn't drown out the song.
This screenshot shows the audio of the scream clip. Final Cut Pro 10 allowed us to isolate certain audio in each clip and then change the volume of said audio. The isolated audio on the right is the scream, which we have lowered to considerably lower than it was when first recorded.
During editing, we wanted to have the image of the calendar overlay during a montage scene. The overlay fades in and out to show the passage of time. This shot starts from 1:10 and ends at 1:26. The shot of the calendar appears 3 times, very briefly. In Final Cut Pro 10 we were able to add keyframes to create a path that the overlaid clip could travel along, making it slide across the screen.
The line going through the middle of the screenshot is the path of the calendar clip. We did this with all three clips of the calendar.
Adrienne and Adrianne, the song used for our music video, is 3:52. However, during editing we cut down parts of the song, subtly removing part of the song so that it would fit the length of our video.
This screenshot shows how we removed part of the chorus of the song, and fit the end of the song on. This let us end the video when we wanted, as the song was too long.
For our evaluation, we used Final Cut Pro 10 once more to edit our audience response video. The music we added to it is royalty free music we downloaded from the website incompetech.com. This website had hundreds of free to download, royalty free songs we could use, so we took a song from there.
All throughout nearly every blog post, research, planning, and evaluation, we have included screenshots. This is made possible by Macs, the computers we were using in class. On a mac, you are able to take screenshots using a keyboard shortcut: shift+command+4. This small bit of technology let us add screenshots of what were writing about into almost every post.
These images show what it looks like when taking a screenshot of a whole window (top) and when taking a screenshot of a specific thing by clicking and dragging (bottom)
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