Research for my Filmic Journey

Focusing

I decided to look into how to achieve a good pull focus along with tips on how to focus my camera in general to achieve the exact shot I want in as little time as possible. I found this video to be really useful as it shows you how to practice focusing on different subjects as well as focusing while moving closer or away from the subject.

I wanted to practice focusing on different objects and using shift/pull focus so I made a short montage of practicing focus techniques.

Speeding up footage

After I filmed a very long shot (about 9 minutes) I condensed it down into about ten seconds. This took me a while as I was playing around with the different ways of speeding it up. Overall I'm quite pleased with the outcome however I may add the sound in for my final piece.

I then practiced with some different ways of speeding up footage with different subjects and ways of recording it.

Stop motion

For the 'Influenced by another filmmaker" part of my project I chose to recreate a small section of one of my favourite films: Coraline. I thought a interesting part of Coraline to recreate would be opening the door to the other world. Henry Selick (the director of Coraline) used stop motion to create the film, so I'm going to take lots of pictures of me opening a small door in my house and use Photoshop to remove the inside of the cupboard and replace it with an image of a galaxy. In every image I'm going to rotate the image a little bit more than the last which will hopefully give the effect of it spinning.

Adjusting audio volume

In some of the shots I plan to take there will probably be loud unplanned noises that I will want to remove in the editing process. I'm quite new to Premier Pro so I searched how to adjust the volume of the audio clip.