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

For filming our project, we used a cannon digital video camera. The camera requires and SD card for storing the clips being filmed on in the process. This presented me with the problem that my particular SD card was only 512mb big which meant that it did not hold much film on it. This meant that I had to navigate through menus and delete bad takes out on location. This is something that I have not really ever needed to do before, but doing this, gave me much more experience with the camera. 

When we edited our film, we used a Macintosh and a software package called Final Cut Express. Prior to this work, I had never used a Macintosh extensively or used Final Cut much, apart from in our preliminary task. Editing in final cut gave me a lot of experience with the Macintosh systems and I learned how to trim clips, use fades and slugs effectively, create titles and sync music and sound effects.

Screen cap of our final project opened in final cut.

Screen cap of the use of fades and titles, along with sound levels.

Screen cap of sound syncing with the gun shot.

Blogging is also a completely new thing to me. I’ve never had to organize a web page or add content to one before. For our early work I needed to add pictures and embed videos onto the blog. This was quite a challenge sometimes as I was embedding from http://www.youtube.com/ and not every video is able to be embedded as it can be disabled by the user. This meant I had to spend a lot of time finding suitable clips that I could embed. Posting images on the blog was also new, I knew how to but some images were drawn and written on in pencil, meaning that they did not show up properly. To get around this, I had to opening up the image in Macromedia fireworks and increase the contrast so that it was legible.

Overall I think that I have learnt a lot about the technologies used in film production but also in other areas of ICT in general. The use of Final Cut was essential in the production and without the knowledge that we gained a long the way of doing the final task, we wouldn't of been able to use many of the things that we did in the film such as sound syncing and slow motion.