Evalutation-Part 7

Key decisions I made during pre-production and carried on through to my production were that when it came to equipment and the technology I would use I knew I would only film with a Mini DV camera and would not go HD because I wanted my footage have a amateur,documentary like cinematography to make the audience feel like they're a part of the experience while also echoing the documentary that my opening was inspired by. I decided to make the audience feel like a spectator in the film that I would use a tripod in very few shots to maintain the feeling that the audience is a spectator however during production I felt that the lack of steady shots made the opening feel too amateur and not how I had originally imagined so I used less handheld camera work then I had originally planned to but to keep the feeling of the audience being spectators I would often balance the camera on things in the environment or just leave it on the floor because my shots were still steady, they still gave off the documentary feel I wanted and still managed to make the audience feel as if they were a spectator. I used the Mini DV Panasonic camera throughout my production when filming but only used my tripod for a shot where Noor Khan skips and the camera is at an extreme close up , a shot where Noor is skipping and the camera is positioned just out of the room in which she skips, shots of our actress Ellie King sparring and most of the extreme close ups on characters in the gym. I used the tripod for these shots because it allowed the camera to focus on the actors without the camera shaking and it the sound quality was better because you didn't hear the sound of my fingers muffling the mic on the camera. Other than my tripod and Mini DV Panasonic camera I used a handheld Steady cam rig so I could get a nice smooth long tracking shot of Noor and Hashaem walking. I used this over doing it handheld because when it was handheld the camera movement was unsteady and didn't look like professional enough where as the steady cam had the right balance between amateur/documentary while still looking professional.

In my post production I experimented with Garage Band to create an appropriate soundtrack but after feedback from my colleagues and target audience I decided to follow what they requested and got in touch with a British Asian teenager who goes by the stage name "Fly" to put a song together which had to be in fashion with popular music today that would interest my target audience, I believe this proved much more effective and saved me time on having to create my own music which wasn't as good as the music Fly composed. For editing I used Imovie throughout post-production because I already had experience with it from doing my preliminary exercise.

Areas of my production with technology that were less successful were my use of the mic on my Mini DV Panasonic camera which constantly had my sound quality jumping in post production because I hadn't used a proper microphone to go out and record a wild track so I had to resort to using unused footage and trying to form a wild track from it. From this experience I have learnt to have a microphone on hand when filming to pick up dialogue better but also to create wild tracks in production so in post I have a variety of audio tracks to use when editing my work.