Blog #21

The most important piece of equipment for our film is the camera that we use. Originally, we planned to use a regular iPhone camera. I didn’t favor this idea, as I wanted our final product to be the highest quality possible, but we had no other choice. Until a couple of weeks ago, when Sarah was able to get her hands on her aunt’s camera to borrow for the project. The camera is a Nikon, yet we only have experience with Canon cameras for that we used in this class. The reason we can’t use our instructor’s camera for this project is because this one is being filmed outside of school. Since we have no experience with this type of camera, we wanted to test it out before we started shooting our final product. We met up at Sarah’s house to test out certain techniques and features on the camera. This camera has its own mounted microphone, so we wanted to test that to decide if we need to check out the Lavalier microphones. After some trial and error, we discovered that we had to tweak the camera’s settings to not have the mounted microphone audio become distorted. We changed the audio to the setting movie and also turned on auto-sensitivity. With turning on auto-sensitivity, the camera is now able to adjust the audio according to the environment it is in. This will come in handy when we switch from the bedroom scene to the outdoor picnic scene, as I’m sure there will be a lot of wind outside. Another thing we discovered was that in order to have the best camera quality, we had to be mindful of any camera movements. Our film doesn’t have any drastic movements, so we should be okay. We only have soft pans when we show Caroline painting, but those will be shot slowly anyways, so the camera will still remain in focus. In order to learn about the features in the camera’s settings, we taught ourselves by spending time tweaking settings and also by researching on the Nikon support website about the features. The link below is where we learned what the auto-sensitivity feature was.

https://www.nikonimgsupport.com/eu/BV_article?articleNo=000006322&lang=en_GB