Production

What I need to do?

Filming, Sound, Lighting, other assets, editing, testing, screenshots, photos and expectations. 

Practising- Time Codes 

14/09/18

Today in Foxy's lesson we practised setting up time codes and how to sync them with one another. To do this you need to put in the sd card and battery, then you turn on the camera, you press the button 'bars' 

Bars and sound:

menu - TCG-presets,, set the preset, ok at the same time. 

To be able to set multi cameras to have sync time codes you set up the camera as normal and then press the bars button on the side of the camera to test the cameras visual and audio is recording in the correct settings. Then click on the menu and click on the option TCG to bring up this menu called Tc/UB SETUP then click preset. 

Then click yes to set the time make sure you are doing this together to set them at the same time together. Then press ok at the same time. 

To check that they are in-sync you and the other person can read the cameras time at the same time if you are reading at the same time the same numbers then it is as in sync as you can get it using this method. On my production, I will be using the T.O.D (time of day) on my piece because I am filming over five days and I want to make sure the footage looks the same for every VT. 19/09/18Today we tested out our setups for our production, I decided to go with a wide and two close cameras set up so I can cover all of the close people when in the studio set out and have a couple different types of shots giving me chose in post-production. I will have the wide cameras lock on and the two closes lock off so I can make sure I get the best possible shot I can.

Practice Set-Up

28/09/18

I am filming at the college in varied places on campus, this is for the different 'tasks' that I am doing. I will be filming on the 10th, 11th, 17th, 18th and 24th of October for the pre-recorded VT's of the show and then 7th November for the studio live recording. I am going to have a Panasonic lock on and 1 lock off camera on most tasks that don't involve a lot of movement, and for the more of a moving tasks I will use DSLR cameras as they are lighter and easier to work with when moving around, they are also more discrete in public as one or two of the tasks are. The shot types I am using are wide, close, tracking and mid shots. I will be using these shots as to cover all angles of reaction to the task and how they deal with the challenge. 

Practical Work- 

Tasks (VT Shoots):

Studio Shoot:

This picture is of Both of the Panasonic cameras after white balance as you can see they both have a cool tone to them and showing the white balance is the same. 

I filmed my VT's in Justin's Room, C004, I set up two Panasonic cameras to shoot all of the VT's, I did this over 2 days. Day one for tasks 1-3 and the second day for the team task, I could have done it over one day, however, I didn't have the team task fully sorted and ready for shooting which I finished sorting on the afternoon of day one and got the stuff for that night ready for day two.

Task One: Testing

I practised every way of doing every way of completing that task, you could use the alphabet spaghetti, paper and scissors to cut out letters, write on paper with the hidden pen. There may be other ways that I didn't explore but these are the ways I planned for.

Task Two: Testing 

I practised every way of doing every way of completing this tasks, they could use the people within the room, they could use the tables and chairs, the paper and anything else they could find to make a chain.

Task Three: Testing

This task they could have done anything so I couldn't really test this project. It may have been risky, but I believe it will be one of the best tasks in the whole show.

Team Task: Testing 

I tested this one with a few friends, the only two ways to do this. Either person 1 wrapping person two or person 1 wrapping person 2 and person 2 wrapping themselves too. This task is simple and not much could go wrong with it as it is a simple party game. I think this one will be another really effective team task.

Live Task: Testing 

The live task was to sort skittles with chopstick into two bowls in 100 seconds most sorted wins, if the wrong colour was put in they lost a point. This was a challenging one for myself to complete more than I thought. This was a good thing though as I didn't want this task to be easy.  

On the 16th of November, I am creating my final shoot putting together the VT's and the reactions from the cast. I have three Panasonic cameras on this shoot and my location is in the studio. I have got the light set to what the picture shows below. 

I have also got a standing light to put more light onto Caitlin. This effect didn't really come across on camera, however, it did help with the overall lighting of the shoot. We also turned on another standing light on the other side, on Courtney and Dylan to equal out the light. the two standing lights faced in brightening the ends of the area we were filming to give us a little more space. The picture below is of the overhead lights were set at:

What went wrong:

A lot. In short, the VT's I created and exported while setting up was in a DVD format meaning I had to do that again. This wasted another hour of my production time. Then one of my talents had to go to their lesson so I had to wait for them to come back, to make sure we filmed something we got the introduction and prize round done. When my talent came back I had the VT's in the correct format and the shooting went a little smoother, I didn't really plan my script for what my host to say and wrote it on the day straight to the autocue, this was a bad idea as not only was their grammatical errors but my host didn't have a chance to really learn and become fluent with the script.

Post-Production:

In post-production, I had to edit the final look of the multi-camera shoot as I didn't do a live edit using the black magic cameras and the vision mixer. This was because Ritchie and I both agreed that since all of the studio cameras were static. However, this was supposed to make my crew smaller. It didn't. In fact, I had someone on each camera because I soon realised that I would need to have someone monitoring them as I was going to need to be controlling the autocue. 

The Ads’ In My Production:

In my production, there are two ads within it that I didn't create. I used a friends short 30-second, dr. martins ad, that she created for her project. I also used 'Love is a gift' short as a Christmas ad as it was created on a small budget. I thought these ads, as they were also made by media students would be good to be put in my piece and fitted well with the show especially since it was going onto the internet at the end of November beginning of December. This is the email I sent to the creator of 'love is a gift' asking for their permission to use their footage. However, they didn't get back to be and due to the time restraint, I put it in any way as I was covered under fair use as this was for my education and was being used in a non-profitable way. However, article 13 on YouTube would soon not abide by this ruling, but it is currently not in place so I am covered.

Editing:

Editing took a total of 3 days to complete. In a breakdown, it took me 1 day to edit all the long and short VT's, Long ones for the contestants to watch within the studio and the short to show the audience. Then after the studio shoot, it took 2 days to edit, put effects on and transition through all of the footage then export a 30: 51-minute project. In this next part, I will explain some of the ways I edited the project using screengrabs.
Below is a screengrab of the whole project in question:

This is the project I fixed and made over the course of this multi-camera project. Here are a few of the challenges I faced in post-production.

Sound problems- Fixed 

When in post-production I noticed that some of the sounds were a lot quieter than I thought it would have been, the camera that was recording said sounds looked fine when we tested it, by clapping and getting the talent to just talk. However, it was, for some reason really quiet. To fix this problem I exported the final project into Audition and turned up the waveforms of the studio parts. I could have done this with each video then put them into premier pro, but I felt like this was a quicker and easier way to fix the problem. Below is a before and after screengrab of what I did, the smaller waveforms are the before and the bigger ones are the after.

Before:                                                                        After: 

--------------------------------->

Then after I fixed the problem with the audio in Audition I went to: 'File', 'Export'. 'Export to Adobe Premiere Pro...' this was to put the new audio with the project to make sure it was still all in sync and sounded a lot better. It did so I exported that version.  

I also noticed before I exported it that one of the ads sound somehow disappeared in me transferring it to Adobe Audition so I added that back as well. 

Graphic Types I used:

Lower Third: Banner intro and Outro

For this, I copied and Pasted them at the end one I got the style and timings right. To explain what I did I will show you using Caitlin's banner. 

This banner is preset in the Graphics, lower thirds that I chose to use. then I typed in what I wanted the boxes to say as they came out and went away. As shown in the picture below. I also reversed the keyframes to make the banner dissaper the way it came in, as the preset didnt already have that. 

 This is just a screengrab of the timeline to show you what it looks like there, you can also see on the same row as Caitlin G, the highlighted one, there are the other banners for the other talents. They were shorter but still the same layout.

Credit Lower Thirds:

For this, I used another preset banner for both ads as I wanted to give credit to the ads and who made them. I am using the Christmas short credit banner I made as the example. I put in the text what I wanted it to say, what it was and who made it. Then centralised the lines so the writing didn't look odd. 

 This, again, is the timeline to show you how it looked on there. (It is the highlighted one.)

 This below is the keyframes, like to the banners for the talent I make sure I reversed the look of the lower third so it looked more fluent and natural when disappearing all of a sudden. You can see I made sure the shape opacity, vertical scale, and text opacity and vertical scale all went away a the same time shown below in the effects pannel.

Credits:

For the credits I used my Ident that I had made and a preset to fill in all of the people that helped. The preset was handy as I did forget some of the people who helped until I saw that job role and it helped me to remember who did that job. As you see below there is the timeline

 In the picture below you can see my credits I typed in all I needed using the text tool. then I used the motion drop down to make the graphics move up.

 Then I put in my Ident and made it a little further from the credits so when the music hit a certain point the whole ident would be on the screen on its own. Then as the music faded so did the Ident.

Sample (Prize and Task One)-

Full Project- Taskmistress