Evaluation Part Three (Post-Production)

 Once we started editing we realised that we actually needed more shots than we had expected. Although we felt that we had done a lot of filming, and had plenty of footage, once we started trimming, matching on action and putting the shots together we realised that our title sequence was nowhere near as long as we had expected or planned. Throughout the construction of our media product we had to keep filming more and more footage and not one shot was completed in one go.
When using AVID to put and piece together our final product we had to figure out new things and try and find new tools to develop it. I have learnt a lot about the programme AVID and the different things it can do. Although we had lessons on the basics of it, we started exploring the programme and found different uses for ourselves. We filmed the shots of different days at different times therefore many of the shots were different lighting, to make it flow we needed to change all the tones to make them look as if they were all filmed on the same day at the same time. We managed to find a tool which adjusted them to be the same ourselves.

In our preliminary task we filmed a simple conversation between two people; the two different shots we used were over the shoulder and match on action. The final product we made (the title sequence- Horreum) was a massive progression from the preliminary task as we had to do a lot more editing and try and use different camera angles and shots. I have learnt many things in this process as I got to do a lot of filming as well as editing. Some of the shots I found more difficult to do than others as we decided to do many shots handheld as we wanted to make it through the killers eyes and similar to that of a homemade film. I found panning shots quite difficult although we tried to include quite a few because when someone looks around an area it is similar to that of a panning shot. We used a wide pan shot of our victim, which was tricky to get the right speed as it wouldn’t be too slow because it wouldn’t be realistic through the killers perspective, however not to fast because the shot would become blurry. Many of the situations we overcame were trial and error as we had to try and figure out what was best for ourselves. I have learnt how to use AVID, although I am not fully confident with using it, I have a much greater understanding of it. Also in comparison to our preliminary production we used many different tools on the editing programme. Within the preliminary task we didn’t have to consider lighting as we were in a well lit room. When we started filming, as it was in autumn, we didn’t have much time during the day where the lighting was just how we wanted it. It couldn’t be too light as we wanted to create an eerie, creepy atmosphere, nevertheless it couldn’t be too dark otherwise the camera wouldn’t pick anything up and the audience wouldn’t be able to see what would be happening. On AVID however, we managed to find tools to change the lighting of a shot and make it darker or lighter to make all the shots match.
Another factor that had to have a lot of thought put into it was the setting. In our preliminary production we didn’t have to do any recking or find a set location as we just did it within the college, but when we were filming our final production this is something we had to carefully consider. We filmed in three separate locations, a house, a barn and the woods/park. The woods especially have a horror conventional feel about it and it instantly connected with the horror genre.
Another factor to consider is the title. We put a lot of thinking into our title and eventually decided upon ‘Horreum’ as we originally wanted to film the whole title sequence within the barn and ‘Horreum’ is ‘barn’ in Latin.
Overall the process has been successful and I am pleased with our final media product, I have learnt many things thought out the process and have developed different skills since filming and creating our preliminary product.