Evaluation

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Construction:

See some of the lighting breakdowns below:

The editing process was finally completed on 16th March 2017, over 3 months after the start of filming. The editing was a long, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. The timeline below looks relatively simple and light, which reflects the simplicity of the video: unlike a short film, there was no audio to worry about, besides the music, which made editing much easier.

The narrative is also straight forward, and there are no complex scenes which required easy access to a lot of footage during the edit - that would have made the timeline look busier with a lot more layers. Because all the scenes are really brief, the video has a very quick pace. This also made the video easier to edit.

Sam took the most control during the editing because he was the most confident with Final Cut Pro X and had the most editing experience. He "personally dislikes using Final Cut Pro X, as I find the interface difficult to do precise edits in, and I am still not used to the magnetic timeline feature".
However, it was still a very collaborative experience because every week we would watch the whole video through as a group and make comments about things we wanted to change. These changes were generally minor, such as reordering some of the shots earlier in the film to clarify the order of events.


Another change we made was speeding up the footage of the silhouetted hand turning the pocket watch. We did this because the pacing was too slow, and it detracted from the flow of the video. Thankfully, it is not very noticeable.
The more substantial changes were to do with visual effects. He used Triune Digital's Fire Assets inside Final Cut Pro X to enhance the live action fire. Below is a VFX breakdown on some of the shots Sam added CG fire elements to (although only 3 shots are in the video below, he added some form of CG fire to 90% of the fire shots, mostly digital embers).

We uploaded the final video on 22nd March, and promoted it on our own social media pages.



Research:
We used google to research other indie bands to widen our knowledge and broaden our horizons. YouTube was instrumental in helping us discover our tone and direction. Blogger was utilized so we could keep a record of our processes and consolidate out progress.
We used a camera (Canon 600D) and editing software (Sony Vegas) to create lens tests where Sam and his brother (Peter - also featured in our video) tested a combination of lenses and filters so we could really nail the visual style of the video. 
See the video below:

Planning:
To ensure that we kept lines of communication open, we created a Facebook messenger chat, an Instagram chat, a WhatsApp chat, and exchanged phone numbers so we were all able to contact each other in many different ways. We would upload draft versions of edits or digipak designs to group chats, and we were able to instantly feedback and discuss.


Evaluation:
In our evaluation, we used a wide range of media technologies. We used two videos, one was a group commentary on the final video, and one was the evaluation of all the equipment used in filming (at the top if this post). We also put everything on blogger.