Throughout the course of the project, I feel that my skills in various stages have improved. The use of cameras and editing software's has enabled me to improve my skills of not only shooting but also editing video and audio. From the practical lesson right through till the end my skills were improving every lesson. Cutting video, filming, converting files and editing with effects has meant that I have not only improved on previous skill and knowledge but also gained skills that before the project I did not posses. I feel it showed throughout the duration of the project, with mistakes that were made being altered and corrected by either changing the editing or audio aspects or re shooting the entire scene again and even once a change of location was needed.
One of the biggest visual challenges we faced, was the number of shots we had originally felt were sufficient being on our story board proving not to be as sufficient as first anticipated. We felt that we had more than enough shots to film, we were even worried we didn't have enough time allocated to fit in all the shots in to our project. How we were wrong. The shots we had on our storyboard at first didn't even fill a minute of filming, when the project had to be two minutes. Due to this aspect, we had to go back to the drawing board and decide amongst ourselves a numerous amount of other shots that we could use to fill this space. We decided as a group to film an entire new scene to allow the project to flow and not jeopardise the continuity of our project. We also faced a challenge with the mis en scene aspects. This was in the form of the murder weapon we chose. We had been using a road sign as the murder weapon. Once we had shot the scenes, it soon became apparent to us that the sign was not clear to see in the shot. This was partly down to the lighting of the shot as it reflected on the weapon and made it practically impossible to see and also down to it not being visible when we zoomed in on the body. So to resolve this issue we changed the weapon to a brick. This obviously meant that we had to change the previous shots. So we had to re-film various shots and create new ones again to make sure the scenes flowed. Editing was a big part and process in and throughout our production stages. At the start I didn't even know how to cut and edit using adobe premiere but now I know much more, how to add transitions and numerous other effects. Transitions were used generously throughout the course of our project from showing panic and fear to a simple fade to connect with the continuity of the different scenes.
We also learnt we had to be careful with lighting and camera angles making sure every shot looked right, this is something we did not previously anticipate. We had a similar issue with the audio side of things as we did with the video. Our opening scene was filmed in a woodland, which happened to be located next to main very busy motorway. This obviously caused numerous the main one being the issue of picking up audio, due to the busy motorway next to where we were filming. So we went about combining both diagetic and non diagetic sound to compensate for the poor quality of audio we had picked up. So this taught me and my group on how to capture, use and edit non diagetic music in order to add tension to the scene.
