What have you learnt about technologies from the

process of constructing this product? 

The Camera equipment At the start of the course I didn’t know how to use the camera, lighting or tripod. However after being taught by my peers and teachers I have now learnt the basic techniques and how to improve the quality of the footage. I have learnt that in order for the footage to be clear and professional, the camera must be in focus at set at the correct frames per second. For example, myself and the other group members struggled to capture a clear establishing shot, but after changing the seconds to 50 frames instead of 24 we found that the quality looked much better. I have also learnt about all the different types of camera angles/shots and how to perform them. For example, a tilt requires the tripod in order for the camera to be steady and smooth and that a tilt can be performed by tilting the tripod upwards or downwards. In addition, from this I have learnt that the tripod can come in as really handy when filming as it ensures that the footage is still and not wobbly. I have also learnt that the lighting is very significant when filming as it can improve the footage by again making the quality clearer and more professional, however unfortunately the bulb blew whilst we were filming our extract and therefore resulted in us having to depend on natural lighting, which was very risky due to the weather being fairly dull and cloudy on our filming day.

BloggingAt the start of the course I had no experience with blogging and very little knowledge about the blogging industry. However I now know many techniques such as; how to upload individual blogs and how to manage my blog efficiently. After learning these basic skills, I was able then able to learn new advanced skills. For example, I learnt how to customise and edit my page to improve it’s presentation and how to alter the text and layout to your own personal taste. Another skill that I have learnt is, how to embed codes from other websites and to paste them into the HTML. Also towards the start of the course I have learnt what each symbol means on the top tool bar, for example; the picture symbol allows you to upload images from your computer drive and into your post and that the film board symbol allows you to copy links from YouTube and place the video into your blog post. In addition, after making the posts visible for others, I found that you can make improvements and alterations to your post by selecting the pencil symbol that’s located directly under each individual post. Overall, I didn’t face many issues with the blogging, apart from when the font and colour of the text wouldn’t change, however my teacher then advised/told me how to solve this issue, which was by changing the HTML code manually.

Editing software (Adobe premier pro) At the start of the course I didn’t have any previous experience with using the editing programme, Adobe Premier Pro and I had little knowledge about how real films are edited. However after being introduced to the programme during my preliminary task I was able to quickly pick up the basic editing skills and became more confident about editing, which made me look forward to filming and editing our actual opening sequence. From using the programme I have discovered the black and white filter, in which we used to remove the warping lines that appeared on the footage due to the poor lighting. Another skill that I had learnt was how to cut down/crop the footage using the ‘razor tool’ which is located on the left hand-side tool bar. This skill enabled me to cut down the duration of the extract which was an important technique to know due to our original, initial footage being over 3 minutes long. In addition I have also learnt how to import and overlap footage to create effect and I have learnt that you need to detach the audio from the footage first before making alterations to the film as this could change to sound levelling and make either dialogue or audio sound un-professional. However I also faced minor issues whilst editing the extract, for example; I found adjusting the sound level difficult at the start, but was fortunately shown how to perform this task correctly by my other team members.  

The microphone and SD card In order to capture clear audio, myself and the other team members had to use a recording microphone. I personally didn’t know how to use the microphone at the start of the course, but due to the device being fairly simple and easy to use, I quickly understood how the microphone functioned. We initially intended to use a internal microphone, but found that the captured audio wasn’t to a clear or high standard and sounded very muffled. Therefore due to the sound being very significant within the opening sequence, we decided that the recording microphone may capture the audio clearer. So then we chose to record the antagonist’s dialogue using this device and after importing the audio onto the editing software, we found that the audio was in-sync with the footage and sounded more professional. In addition, In order to capture the footage, we had to use an SD card so that the footage would be stored. Fortunately I have used an SD over the previous years, so therefore I understood how to import the footage onto the editing software.