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

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

The equipment that we used was very basic. For every scene we filmed, we  only ever used three cameras. This was so that  we carried as little equipment as possible to our filming locations. We found that we had few difficulties with the cameras as we learnt a lot from our continuity task - this time, we made sure that we checked the cameras battery levels at least an hour before filming in outside locations so that we could charge them if they needed to, which luckily they didn't. 

The only other difficulty that we had with the cameras was the quality, as we used Amy's HD camera as well as the sixth form cameras. When we came to editing we realised the difference in quality which disrupted the continuity. However, we couldn't refilm as this would have also disrupted the continuity of the dialogue, as lots of it was improvised. So in the end, there was nothing we could do about it. 

The only other difficulty that we had with the cameras was that when we were due to film, we found that other groups that were using the same cameras as us forgot to return them, so we had to improvise and film with only one camera for our opening scene. This, luckily, wasn't a problem as soon as we got filming as there was no dialogue that we needed to film at the same time from different angles for continuity and we followed the 180 degree rule and match on action in our second scene when filming at the car park, so this time we focussed more on including as many different angles as possible to get the best possible shots.

Some interesting shots that we did using this one camera was the fade at beginning onto Mitch's face in the shed. This was used simply by turning the only light source that we had towards this face manually, I stood behind the camera and did this. This meant we had less editing to do once we got back to south form and proved very effective as we could get the exact speed and amount of time we wanted for the fade instantly. We could also see the effect straight away and could make the decision whether we wanted to keep it or not, which we did. As well, doing the fade like this meant that we didn't start from complete darkness and helped keep the continuity from the shot before. 

For the best results whilst filming, we put the cameras on tripods whist filming the car scenes as we wanted a mix of shots from a hand held camera and a steady camera. 

The tripods proved to be difficult at times as they weren't as steady as we would like as some of the cameras didn't fit on properly. We worked around this by putting paper between the tripod and the camera so it was level.
 The tripods worked well as we could adjust the legs easily to the height we wanted, so we could easily have different angles  of the car and the characters in the car.




Once we started editing, we downloaded all of our footage onto iMovie, and used Garageband to make our own music as we couldn't use any published music due to copyright. Other programs we used were  youtube and blogger to document the editing that we did.


Garage band

We enjoyed learning how to create our own music using Garageband, and explored lots of different styles of music that we could use. We decided that we wanted an upbeat and modern style of music that reflects the main characters personality. It also needed to have annotations of adrenaline to get the audience excited about the rest of the film and to fulfil the aim of them wanting to carry on watching. 

We learnt that we had to start by finding a good beat to carry the piece of music, and then used a trial and error technique with finding the right guitar pieces and slowly built it up from there.

The only difficulty we had with Garageband was transferring the music from one computer to another as we delegated the music to one half of the group whilst the other half edited. When we came to put t all together we found we had no way of doing this. Luckily, our piece was quite simple so we recreated it on the computer with all of the filming footage on. This meant that the people who weren't primarily involved in making the music had a chance to tweak bits they wanted to, so that everyone was happy with the overall result.

iMovie

iMovie was the most difficult software to master, and I was grateful that we already had experience of it from our continuity task. We learnt how to cut our footage quickly and precisely and this came in useful as it sped up our editing time for our final piece significantly. The only thing that we didn't learn what to do in the continuity task was how to add music and a voiceover. By fiddling around with settings, we quickly caught on how to do this. Except, at first, when we didn't know how to add a voiceover we recorded it on our phones instead and synced it to the computer. This was unsuccessful as we didn't get the timings right which is when we asked how add a voiceover directly over the piece. Once we mastered this we had to overcome the fact that the computer room we were using to edit was always very loud and busy and we needed complete silence. So instead we organised times outside of lessons to record the voiceover and this was very successful and we got it done very quickly. 

Blogger

Blogger was easy to use as I already have a fashion blog on blogger so I simply created another account on it. It was good to use as we all had our accounts open whilst editing so we could document everything that we did. I tried to do this consistently, at least once very fortnight to keep on top of work load and so that everything was fresh in my mind when recording it. Blogger was easy to keep track of this. The only problem we had was that we couldn't upload videos directly, meaning that we had to put videos on youtube at home and record it from home.

Youtube

Youtube was essential for our evaluation as we found clips of other similar openings to ours and compared the effects used. We also used this for inspiration whilst we were editing our own opening. However, youtube does't work on the computers in sixth form so we had to do this outside of lesson time. We used youtube to add clips to our blogs to make them more interactive, and to demonstrate the other openings I compared our opening to. As well, we took screenshots of specific shots we compared them too, as well as suing this for inspiration before planning for our final piece, and throughout the editing process as well.

Overall, we learnt a lot about the technology on Mac computers and how we could edit as quickly as possible. We also learnt how to create our own effects whilst filming which was really interesting and fun.