Of all the Health and safety considerations the equipment that causes the most concern and risk must be lighting.  240v, live cables trailing everywhere to trip over, those cables attached to heavy lights high on stands to tip over and finally that’s not taking into account a few thousand kilowatts of heat to burn hands and set things on fire!

Taking into account these concerns……………………………

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland'

YouTube is full of fantastic amateur films, where people invent stories or portray outlandish spoofs of seminal TV or cinema moments. What it reveals is that digital technology is extremely democratic, and that playing a ‘character’ is hugely liberating.

Having run numerous camera and drama workshops for students and adults, I know that using digital technology creatively, can unlock certain individuals and reveal a confidence that was previously lacking. So how can we use audio-visual equipment not only to create and share information, but also to build confidence and communication skills?

Perhaps the answer lies in ‘character’, in not having to be oneself. From the moment we master language, we make……………………………

http://web.canon.jp/imaging/eosd/firm-e/eos5dmk2/firmware.html

The DSLR in the last six months has begun to make huge changes in the way we shoot video. The film like quality of the resulting video, the huge jump in quality SLR lens give over video camcorders, it all makes the format perfect for shooting artist material.

Have a look at the Canon promotional Video by Vincent LaForet below to see what can be achieved.

Click the HD icon to see a higher definition picture - do pause the other one first!  Remember what you're seeing is, even in the higher quality version, only a compressed version of the 1080 line original.

They are many striking examples of the artistic medium given life by the digital SLR, but if you browse the net……………………………

What we see in front of us on the screen will dictate what we expect to hear.  Over the years I’ve worked in numerous areas of broadcasting, one job I do for a long time was sound dubbing for the Nature History Unit in Bristol.  Most footage is shot on either a very long lens or in tiny macro and is actually mute - i.e. there was no recorded ‘live’ sound.  Everything you see was dubbed on using sound effects, live spot effects (me) and wild track atmosphere……………………………

Most domestic and semi-professional video cameras have a stereo ‘internal’ microphone set into the front of the camera.  We’ve all seen the ‘home’ videos were you can hear the person with the camera breathing heavily rather than what’s on the pictures.

Well you’ll be surprised to know that professional cameras don’t have this microphone!  Although they have the capability to record in stereo (they have two audio tracks), the microphone attached the front (which can be unattached or replaced) is a single mono microphone, which is much more directional than the stereo version.

Unless you are recording a TV drama or film, professionally you would not tend to record in stereo on location.  The use of stereo on location recordings complicate the……………………………

Andrew Marr

Documentaries come under the category of ‘factual’ programmes, and as the title suggests, the content should be based on facts, an objective and balanced presentation of an issue or event. Documentaries by their very nature rely on capturing ‘spontaneous’ material, and this often means that the content cannot be scripted prior to filming. So how can we help students prepare effectively for making a documentary film? It’s a bit of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation.

Which comes first – script or filming? The answer of course, is neither. What should come first is research. Knowing the subject matter and the story you want to tell can only be achieved through thorough research.

Thankfully, there are numerous ways in which research can……………………………

CD (Compact Disc), our first mass digital format, arrived with us over 25 years ago. It gave us clean digital sound in a way we hadn’t experienced before. There have been new HD audio disc formats introduced over the years (SACD), but CD was so well established they’ve become rare items.

In 1993, with the computer revolution well underway, MP3 was introduced to enable music to be stored relatively easily on a hard disc. A 3-minute CD track represented a raw ‘PCM’ file of about 60mB, whereas a MP3 file was only 3-5mB, allowing over 10 times the media to be stored.

So how does MP3 achieve this? As well as applying a mathematical formula to the raw PCM data to reduce its size, it applies……………………………

I made a poor start with the head of Media Studies at my local school. The school had only just achieved Technology and Media Arts Special status and the A level media studies course had not been running for long.

It was my first meeting with him and he obviously wanted to impress a Governor. I can’t remember the exact figures he gave me, but some of his very first words to me were his proud boast that last year they’d achieved an average exam score in the high 90’s percentage wise. He was a little taken aback by my instant lack of response and seeming lack of enthusiasm – he didn’t know quite how to take it, I think expecting me to break……………………………