When presented with the brief, I knew that I didn’t want to create another boring informative video. When paired together, Roxy and I started to think of mock-up step-by-step ideas that would be enjoyable to shoot as well as watch. We began thinking of the books “… for Dummies” and since we had to base it within the university to keep things fair,
we thought that a ‘university for Dummies’ could be quite fitting.
We needed to come up with a title and come up with the steps to star in our ‘guide’. We came up with the name ‘Nightmare on Freshers Street’ and decided that we would take inspiration from ‘Little Britain’ with the mature, ‘proper’ narration contrasting against the childish humour shown on camera.
As we were being assessed for the audio of the production we had to focus on this as a priority. Within the video we decided to make the soundtrack the focus. This allowed us to take inspiration from music videos for the acting and editing in terms of the footage we were going to shoot. We decided on each of the scenarios before choosing the music that we would put to the background.
The video is introduced by an on screen title and a narration to ‘Me Too’ by Meghan Trainor. The entire first sequence is stat against this song with a narration clip half way through. The narration was recorded using the university recording studio but in post, I decided that creatively, it would sound better if it sounded like a radio/intercom - a bit in the style of ‘Mission Impossible’ To create this effect I increased the volume to 12dB and dampen frequencies after 1000Hz. After this I placed a high pass filter set to 6dB to reduce some of the noise to see the effect. I felt like this wasn’t strong enough so I repeated both steps again which made it sound more like the ‘radio effect I wanted. At the very end, we used a lavalier microphone to record footage to sync with a piece of footage shot using a mobile phone. Alongside this, we had shot some background outside audio footage using a shotgun microphone at the side of the road. I coupled this audio alongside the original captured by the lavalier to make it more natural. We shot the audio outside my house on a quiet estate so there were no ‘signs’ to make out sound outside.
For the next segment we used audio shot on the shotgun microphone inside a classroom. This was put against a quieter backing track alongside the narration. I made sure the soundtrack attenuated for the dialogue to be heard. This allowed me to used the footage that the audio was synced with. Its a very flat piece of audio but this worked quite well because of the tone of the section.
In the final section of the film, I again places some outside background noise that was recorded separately to create a sense of realism while the character was throwing rubbish out of the window. I made it very subtle so as not to divert from the overall style of the film.
If I were to complete this project again I would put much more attention into time management and make sure that I can overcome any outside obstacles. Also I would like to make sure that in future I don’t bit off more than I can chew. I think I took on too much extra curricular work which meant that when something unforeseen came up there was no more time for manoeuvre.