A2 Media- Harriet Claridge

Monday, 11 July 2011

Practice with a green screen

During Ace Week (activities week at school) me and another student were asked to make a video for use in a democracy activity the following week. We had to create a news broadcast about North Korea testing a nuclear weapon. This involved us setting up the green screen and filming in front of it. Once we had filmed in front of the green screen, we had to import the footage into Final Cut Express, then take out the green background and replace it with an image of the BBC logo. This at first was quite time consuming however once we knew what we were doing, it was much easier. We had to use the Chroma Keyer to get rid of the green before replacing the background with an image.

During the week we also learnt how to record and edit a voice over using a microphone and the program Audacity. This was a really useful process to learn as I may need to use it in my work next year. As the subject of the video was Korea, it was impossible for us to get our own footage. To get some footage we found the clips which we wanted on YouTube, and used the program Screenflow to record it. This meant that we could then go on to crop it and it would appear as a normal video. I had not used Screenflow very much before so found this activity really useful.

Thursday, 16 June 2011

test footage.mov

Before we filmed the final footage we needed to see how dark we could make the videos we took. This meant going out and taking some test footage that we could work with. After playing around with colours and filters we produced the video above. It was not as dark as we would have hoped but it did look like night time. The main issue we had was the fact that the sky remained the lightest area which we needed to be the darkest. This was an issue which we addressed in our final filming.

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Location scouting

For the outside scenes in the trailer we needed to search for the right location. One of the places that we looked at was a small area of trees down the road from my house. This location was not brilliant as there were not many trees and was a bit too green. The trees were also too close together, however it was a good location for testing out the model wicker man and different shots. Some images of these locations are shown below.

Prop Testing

One of the props used in the Blair Witch Project trailer is a wicker/ stick man which is seen to be hanging from a tree. I tried making one of these using sticks tied together with green string. We did encounter problems however with the model we made as it was quite large and therefore we had to film it from further away, again meaning that we had to try and place it high up in trees which was just not possible. Taking this into account we decided to carry on filming with this model just to get an idea as to what it looked like. All of the images we took of this model was in the same location which did not really have the right type of trees (this was not a major problem as you would not be able to tell this unless looking closely). The lighting and positioning of the trees were also not quite right which is something we need to consider when doing the actual filming. Another issue that arised was that it was quite hard to see the stick man against the trees and leaves in the background. We tried solving this by placing it more in clearings so the figure is against more of a plain background.