Evaluation Question 6

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

What have I learnt?

Although I had done some filming before I started this project, it was only with a digital camera or something similar. Now that I finished this project, I would say that I’m used to using more professional cameras as I can adjust the settings to my taste. I am proficient at most aspects of it, like transferring the data or changing the focus. This was also the first time for other programs or websites, like Blogger or Final Cut. I have never been interested in blogging and I rarely look at the blogs of other people. Although I haven’t been particularly bad with English skills, I feel that this has helped me fine tune them. For the editing side, I have even less experience. The closest that I’ve been to editing before was watching and helping Kyle edit videos in Sony Vegas Pro 12. Even though these two programs are clearly different, I feel that I can carry over the experience that I gained with Final Cut over to other programs and I believe that it has helped me get used to editing.

What key decisions did you make during pre-production about technology?

Even before we started thinking about the plot of our film, we had all wanted it to be a horror film. I used Blogger to post a simple idea on what the story could be. The three of us then pooled our ideas together to create the story that we ended up with. The script was then rewritten using Celtx. Celtx is a program that is used to write up storyboards in the same way that professionals do. After this, we wrote more posts about the prop list and shot list needed for the film, amongst other things that we needed for the film.

What key decisions did you make during post-production about technology?

Once we had finished recording all the scenes for the film, we used Final Cut Express to edit the scenes and piece them together. The internet was used to find sounds and music for our film as it sounded rather bare without any. Examples of the things that we used would be ‘Stinger’, the music used during Volnus’ scene and the sound of the ticking clock used during the montage. However, these along with the edited scenes, were lost close to when we were about to finish after the Mac we used to edit the film on broke and the IT technicians didn’t retrieve the lost data. Because of this we had to re-edit the film in a small amount of time. However, we still had all the scenes on the tape and we only had to retake one voice clip. Re-editing the film didn’t take as long as the first time, but it still felt tedious to do. After finishing the film, we uploaded it to YouTube and linked it on Blogger.

Technology during production

The film was captured on a SonyHD1000 camera, which we got as a rental from college. Thanks to this, our footage was of high quality and as such it looks more like an actual film. The scenes themselves were edited to change how they look to better match the setting. An example of this would be for the shots of Volnus. The lighting in the room was too dark, so we had to adjust the focus so that it set on specific things with manual focus.

Another thing which we used technology for during production was a sound recorder. For the parts that were voiceovers, we couldn't record them as part of the scene so we had record them separately. The raw recordings of the voices didn't exactly fit with the scenes, even though they were of high quality, so we had to edit them in Final Cut Express to get them how we wanted. Even though the voice clips were edited, I think that they still sound like diegetic sound.