Thursday 17 April 2014

Looking back at your preliminary task what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?

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?


I have learnt a lot about the technologies used to construct this product. Using Final Cut Express has taught me more challenging skills than just cutting and piecing together clips together. Final Cut is a useful tool to edit the product in depth and adding a variety of special effects such as turning down individual clip background sounds. But also skills like including non diegetic sound and titles and credits. These skills were new to me therefore the process of constructing the product took longer as I had to learn the steps while I was doing it.
For most of the new skills I had to research how to do it beforehand or get help from someone who was experienced, watching them and or being instructed by them to learn how to do it.

The introduction to our production was difficult becuase we wanted to have a motion picture at the beginning with the production name below. Converting the video took the longest because I had to convert it to mp4 for us to be ablt to put it onto Final Cut. Also including the title was new because we had to make sure that the text was in th right position throughout the introduction clip. Editing the opening scene itself was easier to do becuase this is something that we knew already and we was focusing on editing in the music. The diegetic music was decreased when it was too loud or not needed during the specific time of the scene. We also used sounds effects that were already on saved onto the computer making it easier for us to put onto Final Cut. Some of the sound effects from YouTube and we had to convert them to upload onto the software. There is a news read which we had to record and add which took a long process and learning how put the recording onto the  computer itself. We needed a lot of assistance in doing this. The ending was difficult and we needed help from someone who was experienced as we have never done this before. This is because we edited a certain part of the end clip out and used Photoshop to for it to slowly appear and disappear within the fitted text.

I learnt how to change the brightness and contrast of the individual clips and making sure that the lighting was continuous throughout the scene. The lighting in the product wasn't as clear as we wanted but it followed the convention of the being dark and quiet so then it will create the eeriness of the atmosphere. The Sony camera gave us detailed shots but we used the brightness and contrast on the camera to get a darker effect. The camera also lets us experiment with Having the natural light dark makes the audience wonder what's happening as they can't see every movement clearly; the audience get the sense of fear and are involved with the main character.
The camera lets us experiment with the shot more. I used panning and long shots at the beginning for the establish shot. It was difficult at first to do the panning correctly as it was hard to keep the camera balanced but eventually learnt how to pan using the tripod. 

To keep track of all of the research, planning and any changes made during the production, we uploaded everything we did on our individual blogs and at times it was difficult uploading scans. This is because I had to convert the scans before uploading. Plus uploading the production work was also difficult because we had research how to convert the file itself so it was available to upload onto YouTube. Then embedding it onto our blogs was much easier.