26th March

Lesson 40 and 41
We primarily focused on sound in today's lessons. We need to edit out song so that the changes in it fit with the transitions of our sequence, as now we have cut clips shorter it no longer fits as easily. We also need to record some ambient sound as our song will not be long enough for the whole film, and we will use this at the end, one the music has faded out. 
At the start of the lesson I asked for a camera to go and record some natural sound, I had to charge this for a while so I gave input to Amy's task of editing the song. She removed sectiond for the song and re-lined the up the clips so that the specific changes within the music change as our sequence transitions took place and it fitted along  side the filming. She ensured all the clips were lined up correctly and that the sound flowed into on another, instead of suddenly jumping mid note. I gave my opinion of if this sounded right. One of the clips jumped, so we added a cross-dissolve so that they faded together so that this change in note was not noticable and it blended together and sounded more smooth. We used the pen tool in final cut express, to change the volume of the clip so we could fade it in at the beginning and out at the end and into the ambient sound. 

We then had to find a quite place to record out ambient sound. We walked around the school to various points, but because of the hot weather most classrooms had windows open so we picked up conversations. The point we final chose was near the school entrance, but was far enough away from class rooms, there stood under a tree so we hoped we would hear some birds. There was also a road near by, so we had to wait for any noisy cars to pass before we could start to record. We wanted the surroundings to be as close to the park as possible. We only managed to record the sound for 60 seconds as people started to approach where we were and there was sirens in the back ground. We will have to loop this so it can be heard behind out music.
I think we achieved a lot today, and we only have the titles left to apply and then we are finished with our sequence. Our video has improved a lot from when we first started and I think I have improved at using final cut express and the mac computers in general.