Production

What and how you filmed?

I filmed Morgan, Matt, Nate, and Sophie talking about various media topics around a circular table. I used 3 Panasonic cameras that all had one legged sound. The cameras where set up to have one with a wide angle on everyone while the other two focused on a pair of people each, all locked off. The main sound I planned to use was from a hanging shotgun mic, while the others where used to audio sync. Unfortunately the audio sync wasn't perfect and so I, with some help from Foxy, adjusted to the exact frame on each of the three cameras so it was perfectly synced.


Theories Applied

Two Step Flow
My entire podcast is a part of Two Step Flow Theory, with the presenters being Opinion Leaders while the Audience are Influentials. We are telling the Audience our opinions, positive and negative, about the Media Products that are brought up. The Audience in turn are being influenced by us and our opinions. They're affected even more due to our position studying the products we discuss.

Logo

The first version of the logo looked flat and didn't grab the eye. I liked the shape though after using warp on it.

I added bevel and emboss which gave it more depth, but I felt it was still missing some kind of iconography or picture element.

I added and warped a game controller and coloured it in a contrasting colour to make it stand out more, and then added the same bevel and emboss.

Sophie, after viewing it, mentioned the text wasn't as readable. To compensate this I increased the size and soften on both the controller and text to make them stand out even more. When I referred back to her she said it looked much better and was easier to read from a distance.

Comment response

Justin's first comment is that it is way too long. Over 100 minuets of video isn't what he wants to see. Instead he recommends picking one section and cutting it into a 10 minute section. From this I think I'll rename it to some form of highlight reel of a section of the podcast, with the full thing being separate. Also the Technical Difficulties section should instead be a bumper and sting as Justin feels the connotations of a Technical Difficulties screen doesn't help sell my podcast. Also when it changes topic there should be some visual aid for the audience, otherwise its too subtle. I suggested lower third text cards along with video cards to show the different topics. He also mentioned that swearing should be bleeped out and I should use a section with less swearing outright, and the section I choose should have less talking over each other so its easier for the audience to understand it.


Full product



Cam 1

When editing Camera 1 there was one main change I made, and that was the framing. In the original you can see how there was too much head space and behind Matt there was a section of curtain that showed the back side of it, the colour of which was jarringly light. Normally I would mask and key the curtain out, especially with the static camera, but my lighting choices made it rather difficult to do. Instead solving two problems at once seemed like the best idea. As you can see in my screen capture of the effects menu along with the differences between the edited and unedited clip, I zoomed in slightly and aligned it so everyone was still in shot while the curtain line was not. This also cut out a significant portion of the dead space above everyone's heads. This was done later in the editing process after the complete timeline was finished, meaning I did have to copy over the effects from the first section I changed to all the others, but that didn't take all that long as it wasn't that long of a timeline by then.

Cam 3

When editing Camera 3 I immediately found that the original camera angle didn't have focus on the people I wanted it to with it instead having central focus on Morgan while having Nate fairly visible and Matt cut mostly off unless he leaned in, as opposed to the clear focus of Matt and Morgan I wanted. To solve this I saved Camera 3 as something to focus on Morgan solely and instead framed Camera 1 as something focusing on just Morgan and Matt in all cuts I originally wanted as Camera 3. While there was a resolution loss in this shift due to the zoom, but it wasn't as harsh as I expected and so I used that. Either way there wasn't a way to easily refilm due to the unscripted nature of this. It was my fault I didn't check the camera, but mistakes happen and I was more focused on getting what I was expecting to be a long recording rolling.

Cam 2

Camera 2 had nothing done to it in relation to framing as it was already well framed and became what I used when judging the adjusted heights of the other 2 cameras. It was made to capture Nate and Sophie and it did exactly it's job. A rare case of things going right in production.

Cam timeline

In the camera timeline above you can see the 3 cameras, each in their own video layer. The top is Camera 1, the middle is Camera 3, and the bottom is Camera 2 mostly because I didn't think about which camera was which when ordering them on the timeline. Wither way toy can see several cuts in lines of Camera 1's clips which are where it switches between the wide view and the closeup made to replace Camera 3. Interspersed are parts where it cuts to Camera 2 to show Sophie and Nate talking. There are 2 instances where I use the real Camera 3. The first is right after the intro sequence when Morgan asks everyone what about a topic to discuss, which I use to help the audience focus on the question by focusing them on Morgan. The second is in the "Minds and Stuff" gag I threw in which I'll talk about a few sections down. All in all I kept the cameras self contained in those 3 lines and, had this been a longer timeline, I probably would have nested to save space and rendering time. As it stands at only a little over 4:30 of actual camera footage, I did not see the point in that, especially when syncing was critical.

Startup

The first thing to note is that the text in this is a different font to the final production. This is because I edited the final piece on a Mac and forgot to switch the font of this section before exporting. Meanwhile I used a PC to capture the screenshots you see here. The reason I didn't just change the text was because I was pushed for time and there was another similar issue I'll explain further down that would have ran me for time more than I would have wanted. Either way, each piece of text comes in with a ding sound I pulled from the internet (copyright free ect.) and then they exit with the sound in reverse. Simple but I rather liked the effect it produced. It was a simple solution to the problem that I had with the fact I had no idea what I was gonna have as my opening sequence when I started to put the thing together. I feel I could have done a lot more with it if I had managed my time better.

Names

The names appeared with the same ping sound, but didn't leave with the reverse as I didn't want to draw attention to them as they where a simple reference for the audience, not an entire feature that needed attention. I didn't change the colour or font for the same reason as it blends into text they'd see every day more easily and detracts from how much they'd pay attention to it while still being clearly visible and readable against the background.

Trailer

The trailer I added above the adjustment layer, cutting into it where the audio cuts off and it begins to zoom. The zoom was achieved simply though an animated scale and animated positioning edit. I wanted it to act as a seamless transition from the introduction of this movie to the talk about it, and the animated movement did this well. I payed attention to the speed it was moving as I didn't want the transition to linger too long but I didn't want it to be jarringly fast and keep to the subtler side. In the end I feel I achieved that. It visually cuts into the trailer upon Matt mentioning it, although I curved its audio in the transition so it was cleaner and more seamless, and also did so in the audio cut off. The audio is in the same layer as the dialogue as it was easier to alter the effects and transitions I was using to smooth out the cuts.

Minds and Stuff

"Minds and Stuff" is a simple gag I made purely because of how Morgan stumbles on his words in this section. It consists of the words 'falling' using animated positioning, and then rotating in the last frame of them falling. Due to how text ends up being registered as a screen sized image when being animated, rotation uses the centre of the text's starting screen as the centre of rotation, leading to the whole word moving when you try to rotate it. I ended up just using trial and error to get it right. Luckily with the speed I made it, it only needed one frame of rotation meaning I just needed to get it in the right place once. The camera I used was one of the only times I used the original Camera 3, as I mentioned above.

Watermark

The watermark was just my logo made less opaque and put in the corner. It goes over the every camera segment and the trailer segment. I put it there originally to distract from the white stripe created by the curtains in the background, but once I fixed that problem I left it there since it didn't interfere with the trailer or any of the subjects of any of the camera angles.

Vocal

Tony recommended that I use a Parametric Equaliser to fix some of the issues with the audio, namely Sophie being quiet and the whole thing sounding somewhat muted. I raised almost everything and fiddled around until it sounded right, mostly raising the higher frequencies, having the lower frequencies lower to reduce some of the ambient noise that started becoming apparent.

Lighting

The purple lighting was created from the in-house LED lights. I wanted it more purple to fit my logo and by extension house theme. Unfortunately this made Morgan practically luminescent and made everything else too muted and flat. To solve this I put a Lumetri Colour on it and adjusted, reducing the purple some and then changing the saturation to bring out the colours of the people. Then I used shadows, whites, blacks, and some other things to darken the edges and bring the focus in some. This was all in an adjustment layer over the top of everything aside from the trailer and watermark, meaning it applied to the whole recorded section without me having to put it into every section.

End

The ending wasn't technically that difficult, It just took a fair bit of space on the timeline. As you can see, this was made mostly in the Mac, and in the transfer to PC when I came to take the screens captures the positions changed. Luckily the export is absolutely fine with the right aligned just as the left is. This is another bit that I would nest if the piece was longer. Using the same ping and reverse ping sound as before, I had the text enter in groups with a second delay between groups and half a second between things inside the groups. The exit starts at 17 frames between the first and second part to go, and increases by a frame each time until its just 1 frame by the end, creating a nice impactful end to the piece.