Evaluation (Question 4)

During the filming process of my documentary I have learned quite a bit about cameras and the techniques to capturing great clips of riding. The camera I was using is a ‘Cannon 600D’ which films at 720p quality at 30 frames per second, learning to simply film with the camera was child’s play as cannon cameras are notoriously easy to film with. However to get more interesting and flowing shots I had to experiment with a lot of different angles and lenses to get each segment of riding exactly how I wanted it too look. There were only two lenses I used and they were a 50-200 mm zoom lenses and a wide angle ‘Fisheye’, both were used quite equally throughout the documentary as this keeps the shot types slightly different and makes the whole film more interesting. The other camera I used was the ‘GoPro’ sports camera to capture all of the point of view shots of the rider, this camera was the most useful as it allows you to really get into the riders perspective as he hurtles down the trails.  However with both of these cameras there was a steep learning curve involved, the positioning and set up of each shot is crucial to how the overall documentary looks. This is why filming took so long as each shot had to be planned and rehearsed so that the riding and the camera work was perfect for the final shot.

The software used was nothing really new to me as I have done graphic design for 2 years so making the two subsidiary tasks was quite a quick process as I already had all of the skills needed in ‘Adobe Illustrator.’ I used illustrator mainly to arrange all of the images and add the text to the double page spread and advert, I personally found ‘illustrator’ a lot easier to use than ‘Indesign’ because I have had a lot more experience using it with my design course. However I did have to learn how to edit all of my footage on ‘Premiere,’ this took a while to get used too as editing all of the clips together was quite a long process especially while trying to learn how to use the software. The hardest part to try and get right was the sound in the background of the interview as it was far too quite, for this I had to try and find out how to raise on bit of the sound while keeping another one at the same level. The music was a bit difficult to try and get right as well as I needed it too fade in and out of the interview clips not just stop and start.

There were three main internet sites that helped my project along a lot, they where: ‘Youtube’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Pinkbike.’ Facebook was a great help in organizing the rides with my friends and for getting hold of some of the equipment I needed to film, I mainly just used the chat function on the website to arrange where and when to meet my rider and occasionally plan some of the shots and locations for the next week. ‘Youtube’ was only really helpful when trying to learn how to use some of the more obscure functions in ‘Premiere’  to help me get the sound right, there are guides that can show you how to do anything on most of the ‘Adobe’ programs on ‘Youtube’ I found this very useful as I was a complete amateur at editing when I began the project. The biking forum ‘Pinkbike’ was quite a lot of help when coming up with the ideas for what type of shots to use when filming specific styles of riding such as downhill compared to park. There is a whole section of the website dedicated to the different filming techniques that you can use to film riding in a forum style lobby where anyone on the website can contribute, this is useful if the people on it are being serious as you can get other riders opinions about the best ways to film.