Week 3

Tuesday

On Tuesday Morning, we had Bee and we were going to be setting up Final Cut Pro X and starting our animatic storyboards.

Bee showed us all how to setup Final Cut Pro X either to the local scratch or to our own hard drives, so that we weren't restricted to working on a project on just one computer. The method she showed us took a little while to do, but was easy to understand when it was finished,

We also learned how to do basic editing in Final Cut Pro X. I already have plenty of experience when it comes to editing in this program, however Bee showed me a couple of techniques I wasn't aware of, such as how to sync my libraries to make sure i can edit straight off my hard drive. Very helpful stuff!

I started editing my animatic by finding various stock photo images similar to the visuals I wanted, cropping and resizing and editing them in Photoshop, and then placing them in Final Cut Pro, cutting them to time and adding various effects.

In the lesson I learned a few ways of how to set up Final Cut to work with a hard drive or local scratch and also starting to edit my animatic gave me some ideas of how I'm gonna structure the shoot of my 30 second narrative.

Thursday

On Thursday morning with Nick, we were looking at the practical set up and use of microphones and other audio equipment.

Nick was kind enough to have brought in his mixing desk, the same model which I have used at the live music venue where I do work experience.

He also had a range of microphones laid out for us.

We split the class into groups and each group had to plug a microphone into the desk, plug headphones into the corresponding channel monitor output, and then get the mic to come through the headphones. We had to make sure the setup worked by:

Plug the microphone into the desk with an XLR cable. Turn the fader and the gain up to around halfway to make sure you can see the mic signal on the screen, and then plug the headphones into the corresponding monitor output. Once that's all done, you should be able to talk into the mic and have it come through the headphones.

This was a pretty easy task in my opinion, although I've worked with various mixing desks and microphones before.

We also learned about hi-pass and lo-pass. Hi-pass essentially cuts the low frequencies, and lo-pass cuts the high frequencies. The inside out naming scheme always confuses me but it was good to learn it visually.

We also talked about how much gain should be used for each microphone. I said that for a condenser mic that's a few inches from the face, the gain wouldn't need to be more than halfway, and for a shotgun, the gain would be relatively high depending on how far away the subject is from the microphone and how much background noise there is.

Friday

on Friday morning we had John and we were continuing with our website development as well as our report on social media.

I spent about an hour or so on both of those things, researching various websites and services for my report, and also working on building up the website.

We were also told that we would have to create a QR code, which would go on business cards so that when we work with clients/prospective clients, we could give them a business card which has our details on, and the QR code would be scanned and go directly to the websites.

We also started on our website logos, working on concepts and ideas for a simple but logical logo.

In the lesson, I learned a fair bit about logo design process, and I also did some research on website design and why certain things work.

In the afternoon, we were doing visual research. We looked at various film title sequences as well as film trailers, and would call out what shots we liked and how we would recreate them in terms of composition and lighting etc.

In that lesson I learned about how to put visual research together and also how to analyse camera angles critically.