Evaluation-AV techniques-part 1

Evaluation-part 1 of Audio and Visual techniques

Working in groups is a lot trickier than I expected, as there is a lot of organising involved, and making sure the other person knows your schedule etc, so then the work can be produced efficiently. Then you have the task of who’s doing what and when etc. Its just compromising with each other of the workflow, needed. So this was the hardest part.As luck enough for me i was in a group of two, even though it was suppposed to be three, of which the 3rd mysterious member, i last saw, way before xmas. Me and Fio seemed to get along fine with our clashing ideas. Fio had her usual idea of niceness, or sillyness, which is great, but it is realy better with explosions and violence, in my opinion, it really adds to the look of the overall piece. She gave in to my demands and i had my nuclear explosions to finish the piece off at the end, with the kid coming out of the dustbin, wondering why everyone was dead. I really wanted to add subtitles to this, but it would have probably ruin it and may have contradicted what i have said.

After viewing all the clips given to us, it was hard to decide which word to go with, for the video montage. After when viewing some certain video clips, we decided the word ‘Anger’ would go with some of the favourite clips. Because we came up with a concept from these clips so ‘Anger’ best described our idea. Our Main idea, is to try and convey ‘Anger at technology’, so there were many techniques which we were trying to perfect. Like at the beginning, there is calmness and examples of a peaceful world, then slowly this is getting taken over and destroyed, by our very own technological creations which makes life better. However it is not just helping us in a good way, it is going to eventually destroy us, at least that’s the story/narrative, that is trying to be be put across. Its just something different to what we could have done, literally for anger would look quite boring, and there would not be much story involved, and with out a shadow of a doubt, simple. We just wanted things to be interesting and to keep the audience ‘on edge’, so they feel like they must see it to the end. So I feel that we have made a mini epic movie. I am quite pleased with the final video, but if we were to have a lot more time, I would work on the sound design, to get that even more synchronised, and to find more samples to fit in with the video.

When it came to the software, at first it was rather daunting at first, as both of us have never really properly used ‘Final Cut’ at all, so learning that amongst editing our video and finding the clips was quite tricky. Although in comparison to other video programs that I have used in the past, this one had a very simple interface, it looked clean and smartly layout, no oversized buttons to be annoyed about, so there was a positive in the end. Also when I discovered ‘Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0’ for the PC, without even knowing how to operate it, I knew how to do simple operations, as it is so similar looking to ‘Final Cut’. I do however prefer it than ‘Final Cut’, when it came to little things like zooming in and out of the timeline, it proved much trickier than ‘Premier’ and it seemed to take me longer, in the process of editing. Also every time when you would edit a sliced clip in the time line in ‘Final Cut’, it would say “un rendered”, ‘Premiere’ didn’t have this problem. That was another thing that slowed the editing process down. I had to resolve in creating entire new video files in ‘Quicktime’, then bring it back to ‘Final Cut’. Of course this was before I knew you could render separate clips (in the timeline). I remember been told what the red bar was above the un-rendered clips, but not too solve the problem, me and my partner both. Now I know this (which would have been useful at the start), I could have finished it sooner, rather than later. Never the less, I am happy with the finished piece and it has taught me a bit more about video editing.