Video camera session

Today the whole class was in the editing studio with Matt and he taught us a lot about the cameras we are going to use this year when we are filming the movie. He first taught us some obvious things such as how to see how much battery you have left. He also showed us how to understand the time code so we know how much the camera has been filming.

Later he showed us how to use the zoom and the focus, Matt also sad that it was important to always zoom until you reached maximum capacity and focus and then zoom out a bit but it’s always important to use the focus and the zoom to actually see what you are filming.

Then Matt showed how to use different effects and explained everything further. He told us about that it’s actually 25 pictures per second that makes the elution of movement. He also showed us how to use the “exposer” which is a number on the display in the left corner. It could be like F2.2 and that number stands for what kind of light showed in the shoot. If the number is high it becomes darker and if it’s a low number it becomes brighter and you do this to find the right light and brightness in the shot.

Later he learned us all about shutter speed and how to set the color temperature.  By using the shutter speed you are either speeding up or slowing down the camera movement. So by racing up the number above 50 you can make movements more clear and not so blur when you’re shooting a scene. This is mostly used when you are doing a shoot with action, sports and cars. Then about how to set the color temperature, you use a button called “wht bal” and first you zoom in on something white, a paper, a wall or whatever in the area/scene you are going to film. By pushing the button you going to get the right color temperature whether you’re inside or outside.

Last but not least he told us to be professional about our film language, so before we start shooting a scene we should use specific words such as standby - rolling – action – cut, these words should be used by the person handling the camera and the actors should then repeat what the other person is saying.

All for now
29/9 -2010

Working with photoshop

Our first Photoshop lesson was with Mat and the first thing he taught us was that we always have to keep track of our layers. It’s often a layers problem if you cannot do some specific action or whatever it is you are doing, always ask yourself the question, what layer am I on?

Mat helped us very strategically to open a picture into Photoshop before we started editing and so on. After that he taught us about cutting and pasting different parts of the pictures, which was pretty simple. We later moved on with using four pictures and mixing them together by using different effects I used pictures from an old James Bond movie, I’m legend, Alice in wonderland and the expendables.

Some different effects he taught us was how to use different kinds of Blur filter, how to change from color to black and white in the picture. We also used different tools such as the clone tool (clone things, obviously) the heeling brush tool, different kinds of lasso tools and so on. He also taught us obvious things such as moving, enlarging and making the picture smaller and everything else you can imagine. We worked half an hour with everything and it went well.

Sorry but I didn’t save any of my pictures but I will put them out here next time we will do Photoshop and then it probably will be more advanced and also better results to show.

Blog introduction

Hi my name is Nina and I’m seventeen years old, I’m doing my first year in Hurtwood House and I’m a boarding student. I’m actually born in Sweden and I live there with my mom and dad. I was born on the 15 September 1993 and have gone ten years to school in Sweden before I came here. I watch alot of movies and I like many of them but mostly I watch series like Heroes, Two and a Half Men, How I Met your mother and so on.

This blog is going to be about my work I’m going to do in my media studies AS classes, you can easily follow what kind of projects we are up to right now and so on. During this year we are going to work with Photoshop, correcting videos, recording videos and everything else you can think about that involves the media subject. The main work right now will be a opening title sequence to a horror or thriller movie, we will record, correct, do sound effects and all that kind of stuff. I hope you as a reader will enjoy everything I will write here and I will do my best to keep it as interesting as possible.

Media studies introduction, in media studies we will do diffrent things such as doing all the stages in developing a opening tiltle sequence which includes the planning of the sequence, the filming of the sequence and also the final editing of the sequence. We will also go through what the diffrence between a thriller and a horror is, also what kind of diffrent geners there are as well. Now in the begining we are also going to look at diffrent opening title sequences to find out diffrent techniques and so on that could be used. Before shoting our own opening sequence we will be able to outline how to use diffrent techniques how to make the audience side with characters and vice versa.