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

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

During the construction of our project, we came across various amounts of technology in order to to piece together our final sequence, examples of these are;

• DSLR Camera
• Apple MAC
• Fig-Rig
• Tripods
• Sound Recorder
• SD Cards
• Scanner
• Premiere Pro
• After Effects
• Blogger
• Emaze
• Prezzi
• YouTube 
• Various free music websites

Having done media previously and being interested in the line of entertainment I was familiar to a few of the tech however I was inexperienced with a few such as the Fig-Rig, Sound Recorder, Blogger and After Effects. 

Now however, I have developed my skills using all of the above technologies as a result of working and learning to get my opening sequence finished. One thing I feel like I have really progressed in is using After Effects to a confident ability in comparison to when I started as i didn't have a clue but one thing that is evident in our piece is our production company logo 'HOWL' in which we used After Effects to add in smoke particles with the swipe transition which made it look more of a professional piece. Additionally, I have become more fluent around filming using tripods and the Camera as I was practicing focus pulls and thinking of unique ways to practice advancing my skills.

Thanks to the access of After Effects, like I said earlier, it has allowed for a more refined and professional finish to our piece. It has allowed for us to create more than just a transition with music. Furthermore, it allowed for us to be original and create our own company through ideas that we had on paper. We wouldn't have been able to do the smoke/ mist effect with such fluency and relative ease without it as we needed to generate a random particle generator and then blur them heavily to give it a smoke effect and then inserting key frames so that the company name shows in synchronisation.

With thanks to Adobe Premiere Pro we could edit footage together along with music all in one place which meant that we could play around with how it looked, for example, the timing of our shots were key and so we used a lot of jump cuts to the beat of our music so that it was interesting and kept the audience at bay. Additionally, some of our credits we used a different back drop and it wasn't part of our actual footage but still we could use transitions and add it in to our sequence. Additionally, the software allowed for us to be able to color correct all of our shots to give a gloomy, eerie feel to our whole opening thus relating more towards our genre. Finally, it also meant that afterwards we could simply upload our exported video, of a high quality to YouTube so that it was accessible to all with ease.

Using the Sound Recorder allowed us to get a crisper sound quality even though we didn't use much, we didn't want our background noise to be annoying and distracting to the audience and using the sound recorder also allowed us to capture a very clean bottle breaking sound once again just upgrading our quality. The use of a high quality camera also meant that we were able to use techniques such as focus pulls and also make our film more interesting by the use of various angles from low, high to steady cam shots.

Whilst filming we had to always be cautious of the camera as it if fragile and a main essential for filming. We would be aware of all of our surroundings to prevent any damage and when it was raining we tried to ensure it was covered so that it didn't get any water damage.

There were times in which we had to re shoot shots due to them not being steady or the framing of the shot meant that there was something in the background or it didn't focus on the correct part in which we hoped, however we simply re shot those or left them our of our final piece.

Without the use of half of the new equipment we would have found it very difficult to put together a gradable opening sequence, the newer tech meant that we could try an be complex giving off better results (usually) however, it can be made simple such as just cutting up footage and piecing it together to give off a good opening so really useful. If we had to manually do it or not have resources such as YouTube to find tutorials it would have proven to be an even bigger task!