The capturing of my footage was done over a weekend with a Panasonic NV-GS300 video camera. With the short amount of time to capture the footage it was imperative i knew what i wanted and got good quality shots quickly.
I took shots of myself in bed for around 15 minutes. I intend to speed this footage up and use it as the first part of my film. I shot the footage rom as high up as possible to give a good view of myself in bed and as much of the bed as possible. Obviously i had to do this in daylight as oppose to at night time. But i hope it being in the day gives the same impressions. Maybe even a better impression, showing a student in bed during the day is probably a better vision of the student lifestyle.
The next piece of footage i shot was of someone drinking a can of lager. I shot this footage of my friend in my room with natural light and the lights of my room. I shot it against a plain background to give emphasis on the events happening. I used an empty can of lager which the actor pretended to drink as quickly as they could. This shot gives the impression of students drinking alot. Watching back the footage of this recording i realised i should have tried to use more natural light as using my bedroom light meant large shadows behind the actor. Also the image should have been framed better, as there is something to the right of the shot that shouldnt be there.
I shot footage of me typing on a keyboard from a birds eye view to give the impression of someone doing work. I also recorded video on my computer screen of me on Facebook. This was to show a student logging on and checking Facebook rather than doing work. This shot could have been done better, i should have tried to aim for having the camera directly above the keyboard as i think it would have given a better shot.
Once i had filmed all the footage i needed i extracted the data from the Mini-DV in the video camera onto my computer. The tape is played and recorded into a computer file. This file is an .avi file. AVI stands for Audio Video Interleave. AVI files contain both audio and video data in a file container and allow audio-with-video playback.
For the process of editing the footage i had filmed i used Adobe Premier Pro. Using this software i cut and spliced parts of the footage i recorded together. I added titles and credits into the film. Using software and these techiques is known as non-linear editing. Non-linear editing is in the simplest terms cutting and pasting parts of the film in software such as the one i used, Adobe Premier Pro, to create your film. By using these methods you can easily change different parts of your project if required. I decided to use a single track over the whole film, i felt that using seperate pieces of audio for seperate parts would have been to confusing as each piece of music would be no more than a couple of second long. The audio i chose was Janie Jones by The Clash. I thought this fit quite well with the subject of the video. The lyrics which can be heard are,
“He’s in love with rock ‘n’ roll, woah
He’s in love with getting stoned, woah
He’s in love with Janie Jones, woah
But he don’t like his boring job no…
No
No
No
Let them know
Let them know”
I exported the film from Adobe Premier Pro as a Microsoft AVI file.
The frame size is 720 x 576 which is a standard 4:3 ratio. I exported the film at 50fps for the AVI file and used the compressor Microsoft Windows Media Video 9. These settings are for the standard file which is played from your hard drive.
I aslo had to convert the file to a DVD format to play from a DVD disk. The .avi file has to be converted to a .vob file to be able to play directly from DVD. VOB (Video Object) files are the container formats contained in DVD-Video media. They contain all video, audio, menu and subtitle content in stream form. The film was converted into PAL format, to make it playable on European DVD players, and the frame rate was converted from 50fps to 25.
Below is the final film on YouTube.
