What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout this project I have gained a large amount of knowledge of the technology that we had to use while filming our film opening. Throughout the film we had the use of a professional film camera, as well as also the use of flips cam and a Mac computer, these were used for different stages in the tasks and or different roles in the task e.g. Mac used for the editing of the film sequence, flip cam used for the preliminary task.

The Sony HDV professional camera we used

When we began using the camera there were many issues that we were faced starting from the simplest turning it on, or putting the tape in properly etc. With the help of technicians etc and the time we had to look over the camera to improve our skills we began to pick it up. As the actor in the group I didn’t have to focus on the camera use to much but I did assistant in certain ideas for camera angles that we then had to position the camera in, which we had to see if it worked without stuff like the tripod etc. When we began by filming we had to make sure the setting was suitable for the camera use in terms of lighting or positioning etc, plus the fact that we also had make sure like the camera battery was sorted etc.

I believe that the most we learnt from was from the editing side and using the Macs to begin editing the sequence into an opening so we would have to any certain special effects like jump cut etc to keep the target audience interested. The biggest problem when we began using the software ‘Final cut’ was the lack of knowledge and experience we had about the program, so we had to spend a lot of time just familiarising ourselves with the program plus we all had to have some knowledge of it as we had one less group member than normal and everyone else. When we started to get the general idea of how the program worked we began in trying to edit the film sequence and chooding the appropriate effects for our thriller opening this still took some time to incorporate everything together and effectively. In the footage we did some slowing down of the footage in order to emphasis certain things like the agent getting shot etc. This helped create the tension in the scene and built up and created the right atmosphere.

In our film we only used ‘Adobe after effects’ for the titles in our film and because it was such a complicated software that we only used very briefly we had a some support in producing our titles, but we decided to go for a more natural but creative option for our credits which was the credits being on the clips of the folders in the file cabinet this fitted in with the job role of the character effectively.

With issues like rendering or other techniques like cropping etc when editing we initially struggled a bit with but with support from technicians and teachers we quickly overcame this and began using the software effectively and the film began to take shape.