Youtube was a massive help with researching shortfilms. They have many categories throughout the site such as comedy, entertainment sport etc. People can also come together to form channels of which they will name themselves and post a series of videos under one name, generally with a purpose and a theme to these sets of videos. I typically always used the film and animation section or looked at the Future Shorts channel. This channel is linked to their own private website as well. They will every so often (2-3 times a week i think) post the best short films that are featured on their site and put them on the main page on their youtube channel. Since youtube has such a large fanbase these days it also gets the person who made the video a lot of feedback on their work.
A very good film information website I used for Director information and date of release etc. was IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base). On this site they generally list just about every film that has been released to the public or is going to be released. they have different sections on each film if the information is available such as Box Office and General statistics to Triva information and famous quotes. It gives you a very good insight to the major differences to major hollywood films compared to independent and British films.When looking into other short films i decided to look at BBC. This gave me a range of short films rather than all coming from the same collection. They put films into groups such as, Duration, Region, Category, Views, it was fairly easy to find you way around the site. BBC has also been voted best internet site on many occasions.
Since technology is always advancing, I thought it would be best to advance with it as well. Therefore, I decided that this year I would use a better video editing software for my product as it would make the editing much better and higher quality than iMovie 06.
For creating my Animatic I decided to use Final Cut Express 4. At first, I found this a little challenging as it was a new piece of software and also it had many more tools than iMovie. However, it had a tutorial which I followed and eventually i started to understand all the basics which got me going. I was also lucky enough to take an editing masterclass at the Co Op FIlm festival 2009. To take the pictures for my animatic I decided I would use my phone, This is because it is easier, and also phones have now advanced to use better cameras and mine was an 8.0mp camera, which was better than what was available to me at the time in normal cameras. I could then upload these to the internet site called Flickr which when I get to a computer I can download and use in the editing software.For my main product, I decided to switch editing software and started to use Sony Vegas Pro 8. This was because it was available to me on my laptop which meant I could edit at home, and in school. Most of the features were the same including the more important slice tool and ripple tool, however they did not both have the same media generators (effects) as each other so I would, for some parts use a piece from final cut, export it as a movie file then import into Sony Vegas e.g. I did this with the titles, which were not as good in sony vegas.
To create both the posters we used Adobe Photoshop CS4. This was a better version of photoshop which school had (Elements 2.0) and contained better Levels to use and also they had tweeked some of the tools so they worked better. We believed this was an improvment from last year as when we tried to edit text and use levels on them it didn't come out as good as quality as it had this year.
I used blogger for the most part of my research and planning. This makes my work ready and available to any of my partners who need to share the screenplay and storyboard and also can collect constant feedback from teachers and other students following my blog. This is good as you can get a constant stream of advice on how to tweek your product to improve its performance. Blogger has since been improved from last year. This means it is easier to edit your text, and also importing photos and moving them around is much easier as there are more options to do with your photos. However, they have for some reason taken away the import video option which means I either have to switch back or embed from youtube. It was also a good chance to do some Podcasting. This is a source which is very popular these days where groups of individuals will give news (or other types of shows) often on a particular topic. We tried to keep up with this and do a podcast every week, however when it got into the main production stage we lacked in timing. My final podcast is here at the end of the article.I filmed all my shots on a DV camcorder, a Canon digital video camcorder MD101 which we used for my AS coursework as well. These camcorders are very easy to use, as I had already used it before however the settings are not so advanced and therefore not many options can be tweeked. Also a fault about these cameras are that there is a fatal 'Grr' when you are filming with the internal microphone. This puts bad background noise over your shots.
To get rid of this sound, we used a boom mic for all the shots or at least most of them. This filmd with a buffer so it also cancels out the wind if there was any. However, when we imported the clips onto the software we noticed it hardly picked up any sound at all, even with tweeking framing so we could fit the mic to the action better, this was either because of low battery, or very low sound capture. This meant we had to up the volume seperately on the software, and lower the volume of everything else.
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