Jackson Davis-A2 Media Blog: Construction

Recording The Voiceover

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Equipment Used

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Delays in Productions

We encountered a few problems when it came to filming. The filming itself wasn't a problem. However, on our storyboard we planned to film at the Ye Olde Sweet Shop in Leicester town. Upon ringing the shop it was quite apparent that they didn't want us to film there. David rang them and got incredibly angry with the manager which didn't help the situation. So after the response from the sweet shop and David's attitude we decided to change the storyboard. Unfortunately the change that we made involved us changing the script also. This meant that hours or work had to be re-done. This didn't really bother me as I knew the change was for the best and that what we were going to change it to would be a lot better.

After the change, we contacted some more people that were more than happy to let us film on their location. Everything that we filmed would be manipulated to make it look like 1950s, therefore the original sign on the shops will be removed. These venues includes "A Close Shave" barber shop in Countesthorpe and the "Countesthorpe Express". We filmed a lot of shots in these locations and we were very grateful of the owners for letting us shoot there.

After we sorted out the storyboard, everything began to fall into place again. Eventually we got all of our shots, we re-did the voiceover and the editing began to come together nicely.

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Film Noir Look Testing Shots

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Filming the Prison Shots

We had great fun shooting the prison shots. We used a practice room in the music department at college. We wanted to completely block out all external light and limit the light source to the single hard light that we had. I think it worked really well. As you can see, we went to great lengths to block out lights from all sources and windows. We used what we could which included tape, display boards, coats, bags and so on. It was a very make-shift setup, but it worked well. In the second photo you can see one of the Panasonic camcorders. About a week later we returned to the same location, same techniques but shot with the Nikon D3200 which allowed to get a much nicer image quality and allowed us to achieve a rich depth of the field.

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Editing the Film

Got all the footage, ready to edit!

This is a photo of David doing his shift of editing. As you can see, we are well equipped with two monitors, our shot-list and a packet of Nerds (Not David)

This is an overall view of Adobe Premiere's interface. I love Premiere, I think its very precise, very professional in the way that it works and it allows me to create professional outcomes. I find that it just connects with my way of thinking, and therefore allows me to use the program without getting stuck with how it works. That is really important as it lets your creativity take control. Dave enjoyed using Premiere aswell. Premiere's interface looks a little bit like Final Cut Pro 7 before version X came out.

This is a close-up of the project preview window in Premiere, this is where we can view our project from the timeline

This is Premiere's timeline. The blue clips are the video files, the pink clips are ones that have been edited in After Effects for Visual Effects shots. The long green clips is the voice-over which runs through the entire project. To the left you can see the different tracks available, you can add as many of these as you like, it is also really easy to turn off visuals from tracks, mute sounds and switch between them. In the top left is the time-code for the project and below that are a couple of buttons which allow us the toggle features such as magnetic timeline and timeline markers.

This is the project library, this is where I can access all of the files that I have imported into the project, this is incredibly useful and really easy to navigate around

This is the video effects panel. It simply allows you to edit and view effects that have been applied to your clip. Most non-linear editing suites have this, but either way, its always a nice feature.

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