Developing Technology Skills - Conclusion

This week, I met my targets for learning new technologies. At the beginning of the week, me and my partner took out one of the new cameras, intending to learn more about them. During our mini-shoot, we took the shots we needed to create some splitscreen shots, and also began to experiment with the manual focus.

We imported the videos into Premier Pro, and began experimenting first together, then independently with putting together the necessary parts of the videos to pull it together into splitscreen. At first, we found this difficult, as we weren't sure where to begin, and so did some research for tutorials on Youtube, coming up with this video:

It was easy to understand and, having dragged the "crop" option onto our videos, began with splitscreen. We found immediately that we hadn't made the camera still enough, as it must not have been properly anchored to its tripod. Due to this, there is a slight camera shake that causes the splitscreen to move slightly and reveal the technique. However, I have after this discovered the "anchor" tool, where I can anchor two videos together, and so hopefully in future, if there is a camera shake, the anchored videos will move together and not ruin the shot.

We also began editing the experimental focus shots we took, filling in my second target - I found options for tinting, brightness and contrast which I used on my focus experiment shots, making the colours more contrasting, and brightening them, as they were a little dark before. I also stumbled across other techniques which, though I didn't use, would be useful in our final music video - lens flares, gradients and similar effects. I also re-learned how to use key frames for gradual fading/increasing of effects (e.g. the increase of brightness at the end of my video below, and the fading of the music). I also found the option for video noise and ageing effects on Premier, meeting my final target without having to explore After Effects.

Having edited each shot how I wanted, I compiled it into a short video to note my progress:

I can now use this as a benchmark for future experimentation, and as something to refer back to if I need it.