Technological Advancements

Since the first film was captured over a hundred years ago, there have been nearly constant advancements in technology, from black and white to colour, from reels to disks and from low quality silent comedy films in cramped theatres to Super HD 3D action epics with blasting surround sound, all from the comfort of your own home.
For my filming I am looking to use a Canon DSLR camera to film on, which is full HD, very portable and easy to use/pull focus and create high quality results. Although these cameras are meant for still photography, industry professionals all around the world have recognized their capabilities and are using them to capture footage onto SD Cards.

“The making of the new and the re-arranging of the old” (Bentley 1997)
In this quote, Bentley says that in order to create a product that is fit for purpose you have to carefully research the conventions of existing media texts that are from a similar genre, and pitched at a similar target audience, to the product/products you intend to produce. But, if you’re re-arranging the old the technological advances are going to be quite different in my medium of film. In the short films that I analysed, such as ‘The Siren’ by Alex Nevill, were all shot on DSLR cameras, such as the Canon 7D giving the films a professional high quality and depth of field to match. I followed the conventions of these short films by also shooting on a DSLR, a mid range Canon 60D which puts the high quality footage straight onto SD card, giving fast, tape less recording. For my editing I used a program called Final Cut Studio, used to edited films such as ‘300’, ‘The Social Network’, ‘Jarhead’ and ‘X-Men’. This product is a simple to use, professional standard program which I personally brought before I began editing my film. A week or so after I spent money on this program, a totally new version came out, which puts into perspective the advancing technology in editing and the professional film industry. Most film editors don’t use Final Cut Pro, but use a program called Avid Media Composer, a more expensive and complicated film editing solution. This program has been around for longer than Final Cut; therefore, just like 35mm film, people still seem to use it as a professional grade way to edit their films. Putting these products at a relatively low price makes them available to the mass public, which is something that really benefited me in the making of my film.

Gauntlett (2007) says that new media (and new media technologies) erodes the boundary between producer and audience to the extent that it makes little sense to talk about media audiences at all anymore: “Conventional research methods are replaced—or at least supplemented by new methods which recognise and make use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers'”. With the availability of professional grade products, what stops any of the general public being a filmmaker? Therefore your audiences are no longer ‘receivers’ but ‘producers’. With this in mind, I feel that the advance in new media technologies really seems to work in my favour, as it has reduced the cost of products that would have been thousands of pounds a few years back, therefore making them more available to people such as me.

If I cannot access these cameras I will have to use another camera that is high quality but records onto DV tape which can sometimes be an unreliable source that takes time in import from the camera onto your computer. The upside of this camera is that I have used it before and know how to capture footage on it, attach it to a tripod, clean the lens and export footage from it. The upsides of the DSLR cameras are that they are higher quality, more portable, versatile and it’s quick and easy to put what you’ve filmed onto a computer.

In terms of editing, technological advancements aren’t such an issue as the school always update their operating systems on the Macs to avoid them crashing. I am intending to use Final Cut Pro to edit the film together, either on my laptop, as I happen to own a Mac with Final Cut Pro, or on the school system. I personally think I should stick to one computer (probably my own) so that the files don’t get lost moving between different computers. There has been a recent update to Final Cut Pro, but I am not planning to get it, because what I have at the moment is capable of handling the film I am going to be taking in the future.

In terms of storage, I am not intending to store all my files on my computer but on a separate device that I own which has 1TB of storage. This should be enough to store all the high quality footage and render files during editing without slowing, crashing or filling my own computer.

I will also have to consider methods of recording sound whilst filming. I could use an external recorder connected to a line microphone and match the audio and visual up in the editing process like in my last project. Ideally, I would prefer not having to do this in the editing process because it takes a lot of time, but if worst comes to worst I will consider it.

To briefly sum up, with the use of this new technology being available, I believe I will hopefully create a professional grade film using high quality cameras, online distribution and editing software.