Evaluation

Throughout out my second year on the DFGA course, the responsive module is the one I have most been looking forward to because I couldn't wait to produce something of my own choice in the medium that I enjoyed doing most, film. I was worried towards the start of this module because there was a rumour going round that it wasn't going to be responsive brief, thank god it was! As soon as we had been briefed on the module I was struggling to come up with an idea for what to create, I knew I wanted it to be a video of some kind but I wasn't sure what of. I sat around I thought about making a skateboard documentary on the local skateboarders of Leeds but after speaking to my tutor about it we decided that skateboarding had been done and that I should look into doing something different. So then my next idea was a documentary on business, small and large and how they had got to where they are today and what they hope to achieve in the future. With this idea as time got closer the companies that I had tried to get in touch with via email weren't responding so I decided to scrap that idea and go for something different. 

While I was at home one evening sorting my files out on my laptop to free up some space I came across some footage I filmed a year ago nearly of my family friend Edd McIntosh, downhill riding. Straight away I had the idea to create a first person down hill video but as creating a documentary had come up in previous ideas I decided to stick with that because it was something I had never really done before properly apart from a skateboard video I made of my friend Joe Winters when I was in college so I wanted to up my capability in video making. Once I got in touch with Edd and told him what I was wanting to achieve and how it would benefit both of use we got to work on planning and shooting. 

Shooting the footage we wanted to get went really well over all, the only main issues while shooting was the odd bit of bad weather we got and the fact that half way through the filming week, Edd's van had to go away for repair so we could only go around Edd's local area to ride and film. There was one shot that I wanted to film most of all in golden hour (sunrise or sunset) mainly because the lighting is so good and footage looks so good in these conditions. Thankfully Edd and myself arranged to go out one evening during the week to shoot during the sunset. The footage came out great and even though the riding wasn't some crazy big jump it still looked really good what we got. Im definitely going to aim to film in golden hour more on shoots. I did struggle how ever to get the cameras out that I wanted from the resource room at uni, one minute I was getting told to email in and reserve the kit I wanted in advance then I was getting told I wasn't able to reserve kit because the demand was too high so that was annoying but luckily I still managed to get all the footage I needed to get with the cameras I wanted to use. 

While extracting footage from cameras and editing the only main issues I had where, how slow the footage from the GoPro's take to convert because they film in .MP4 files, trying to learn new software and following tutorials on how to learn new plugins and sky replacements. They where just long and tedious but I'm glad I followed them because now for the future if I have the same problems with the sky in some footage or want to use the plugin 'Twitch'I used again I can with ease of use! While editing at the start the software I was using was running really slow, in fact my entire computer was running really slow so I managed to get my RAM updated and I started working from my external hard dive which helped a lot also. In future I will make sure I'm working from an external hard drive instead of from my computers hard disk so it isn't competing for space. 

To conclude I am really proud of what I have achieved in this module, I only wish we had a lot longer to produce something instead of having just over a month but I suppose that in industry it could be that you only have a couple of weeks to produce something the client is after. The only things I would probably change in my video is the interview length at the start, I would either cut it down so it is shorter or intertwine it with the actual video footage so the viewer wouldn't get so bored at the start of the video, something I will defiantly consider in any future videos I make. I mentioned earlier that I had minor software issues, this wasn't actually an issue with the software I used to edit the video but more an issue with trying to learn new software in such a short time. I have always used Final Cut Pro X to edit my videos since I received my Mac Book Pro but as I have been told that Uni are changing the software we use at the minute on the machines in uni I decided it would be a good idea to try learn it for this video. Not the best idea in the work with the amount of time I had but it is definitely something I am going to learn over summer so I am prepared for next year and using the computers at uni.