Behind The Scenes.

Photography & Audio Techniques Explored...

StoryBoard

In todays lesson I drew my storyboard for my stop motion video, in it I included details of shots I want to do and where I roughly want it to go. I decided to keep it short as included an animal will have its difficulties so if I did not want to plan it too much in advance.

After doing research I wanted to upload my final video to the platform of Youtube, as well as this I have taken into consideration the type of audio I intend to use, I will be using music and smaller sound effects in the back which I intend to record on my phone and insert in the background of my film.

Overview

In Audio we have been exploring multiple different techniques in order to create good quality audio to mix into films. In the first few lessons we researched platforms for videos to be uploaded and the differences between them that can be found here , in addition to this we went out with an audio recorder and tried to record a conversation in challenging places (outside near traffic, inside with talking and background noise etc). The technique we used for this was to hold the microphone just below our face in the middle of the two people talking, we thought by using this process you would get even audio from both people talking, and it is close enough to hear us as well as some additional background noise to make it interesting. This was proven to work as you could perfectly hear us having a conversation as well as noise in the background, so I knew that if I wanted to add audio to my photomation this is the technique I would use.

     So when it came to creating our photomation film about ourselves, we created the story boards and I then went home and tested out how difficult it may be working with a dog. This was interesting to say the least. So I initially wanted my dog to be in the whole of the film, however I did not take into account how hyper she is, so I adjusted my idea in order for it to still fit what I wanted to do, but just made it a little bit more creative. I played around with 'Burst' on my iPhone as this is the device I decided to film it on, it allowed me to have my dog in the photomation and made the filming process slightly easier, so the scene in which she was in I used that.

  In regards to the device, I initially thought it would be better to film this photomation on my iPhone, however despite this I still wanted to challenge myself so I tried out shooting it on my Canon camera with my tripod, so I took a few test shots with that and reviewed them. Although the quality was undeniably better than on my iPhone, I found that the film flowed better with my phone, so I reverted back to my initial plan.

  After I had taken my test shots with different cameras and angles I went on to film my photomation. The idea of my film was to bring things to life ( shoes, dog lead...) as I found this more interesting than just taking my dog out for a typical walk. As the process went on I tried to film in different camera angles as I knew the film would not necessarily be long so wanted to make what was there, interesting for the audience. After shooting had been completed I put all my photos on google drive and started to edit them on Adobe Premiere. This in itself was a challenge because I had never created a stop motion type video and edited it using this software, only iMovie. So after I copied all the photos into a folder I tried to add edit them together, which is where I discovered those photos that I had deleted in the process of shooting, meant that they were no longer in the correct sequence. So, I decided to open the application Automator in which allows you to change the name of files and make put them into a sequential order. After I had completed this and renamed them all I was able to add them as an image sequence and speed them up to the percent I was happy with.

   Lastly I added audio to my photomation, in the background I found some music on youtube and downloaded that and added it to the background and on top of this I added in my own audio that I recorded on my iPhone using voice memos. I adjusted the audio gain to make them slightly louder at times and visa versa, this then gave me my final video with audio that I was happy with.

   Over all I enjoyed creating this film and the challenged in which came with it, if I were to create another photomation I would want to do a completely different idea with different audio and take the filming/ shooting process outside. As well as this I would like to use different angles and perhaps experiment with using different point of view's, this would make the film more interesting for the audience to view and could also add more texture and interest to the film itself. In addition to these points I believe the brief was to produce a film 20-60 seconds long, however upon editing the images I only had 9 seconds of footage, I knew that I was able to add images in order to make it longer, however it would not have effectively flowed together, so I decided to keep my photomation short and work well, as opposed to longer but not add good quality ( quality over quantity ). This is why next time if I were to make another film that needed to be a certain length, to film more footage or take more images than necessary as I can always edit out scenes if I needed to make it shorter.