Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the production of Turning Pages, we used technology that we familiar with, such as cameras, tripods, Adobe Premiere Pro, Livetype and Adobe Photoshop, as well as new technology, such as the ProCamp and Three Way Colour Corrector tools on Premiere Pro and Audition. Therefore, as well as learning about the new technologies, we had a chance to improve our usage of the programmes that we had previous experience with.

This is our director's commentary, featuring Group 3B talking over our final cut, about what we could have improved on and what we liked about our opening sequence- we discuss our sunrise shots, the titles, the lighting changes and consequent grading process, sound issues and continuity errors.

Pre-production
- Use of new media/ social networking to communicate- we made a Facebook group where we could post and communicate with the rest of the group, as well as a group message where we could inform our actors of shoot plans.
- Adobe Première Pro- Although we had used Première Pro before for GCSE coursework, it was really good to have the chance to use it again before we got onto actual production. We had the chance to get used to this particular piece of editing software again when editing our animatic (below). Obviously the editing process for the animatic was not as sophisticated as for the final cut, but we did learn how to use tools such as the razor tool on Première Pro, add voice-overs and other backing music and add titles to our sequence.


Production
- For our test shoot, real shoot and re-shoot, we used a Legria HV30 camera, a tripod and a microphone.
- As Emily was acting, Anna and I shared out the directing/ camerawork responsibilities between us, so that both of us had equal time using the equipment. Here are some of the shots that I shot:

- One particular advantage of using the tripod was that we could get smooth pans for our sunrise shots, especially our first one.

-However, the microphone picked up a lot of wind and background noise, which meant that we sometimes lost the dialogue, such as the 'Over and out' at the end of the vlogging shot.

Post-production

• We used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit- we had already used this software before so we were fairly familiar with it, but in particular, I found these tools useful-

                         1) Pen tool- to use for the fade in and out at the beginning and end of the sequence and also to control volumes of our various sound tracks (backing music, birds sfx, dialogue, background noise)
                         2) Grading- Using ProcAmp and Three Way Colour, we graded various shots because between different shoots, the weather changed and so did the sunrises. Therefore, the quality of light was different in each shoot and we fixed that through grading. We paid more attention to this tool for this project than we had in previous years- it was actually quite difficult to get the right balance between the colours of the person and the colours of the sky/ground/ sky, so that it all looked realistic.
                          3) Razor tool- In parts where we thought the dialogue had been said too fast or the shot was not held for long enough, we used the razor tool so that we could slightly slow down these shots. For example, I slowed down the part where she flicks through the notebook to build up the enigma.

• We made the REC sign in Photoshop. We made two, one with a red dot and one without, so it would look like the red dot was flashing. We researched films/media texts with vlogging shots; Good Luck Charlie's video diary shots feature a REC sign, and we used that as inspiration. If we had time, I think we could also have added a timecode to make it look more realistic and to reinforce the idea of an amateur film-maker/vlogger.

• We used both Livetype and Dafont.com to produce our titles. Through our research, we found that titles of indie films are usually white and capitalised, and also quite simple. We wanted to reinforce the bucket list theme and so we went for a handwritten-style font called Brain Flower. We prodcued the titles on Livetype, through which we could change their size, position and boldness. One thing we had to keep changing was the positioning of the titles, so that they wouldn't interrupt any of the significant action of the narrative. During our screening, however, we found that reading the titles is particularly difficult when watching from a distance away, so we should have made them bolder in Livetype before adding them into the sequence.

• Audition was used to rerecord the backing track so that it was better quality. Unfortunately, we could not get a whole take of the song that was perfect, so we had to cut together two parts of the song in Premiere Pro, which was quite difficult.