Film Equipment

 Hey everyone! Now that we have finished our movie opener, we are in the editing phase of the project. Today, I will be discussing all the film equipment we used to film our movie opener. 

For our camera, we used the camera on Ngoc's iPhone 14 Pro Max. Specifically, we used the camera in Cinematic Mode. We chose to record on an iPhone due to its accessibility and quality. The iPhone camera is easy to use and generally high-quality. Since we used a phone camera rather than an actual professional camera, this also allows our editing process to be a lot easier, as we can directly import clips to the editing software rather than having to use a third-party cable to transfer files. Moreover, the Cinematic Mode allowed us to create variations in depth of fields such as rack focuses or shallow depth of field. Moreover, cinematic mode has great stabilization. For example, when we were filming the beach scene, the sand was uneven, which made it hard for Jahzara to film smoothly. However, when we looked back at the video, the feature allowed the video to automatically stabilize, even if in reality, the filming wasn't the most stable.

For lighting equipment, our main light source was the sun during golden hour. However, in the flashback scene, we used the existing ceiling fan light and an LED panel stick/pole to act as a base lighting for the room. However, we noticed this lighting was a bit too sterile. We wanted to create a cold, sterile atmosphere, but we also wanted it to have a sense of warmth. As a result, we added a bedside lamp to the set as this added a warm-yellow tone to the room.

Lastly, for sound equipment, we simply used the microphone on the iPhone camera throughout the entire film. We were originally thinking about using lavalier microphones, but then we realized there was not enough dialogue to warrant this. Although we just used the iPhone mic, the quality was still relatively high. 

However, because our location audio has background noise, we recreated some sound in post-production. One of these sounds included the bell sound at the school scene. We were originally going to use a sound effect, but we thought that sounded artificial and unnatural. Ngoc and Jahzara recorded the sound of a bell ringing at our school. In other words, they recorded the sound of an actual school bell ringing.