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

I have learnt a lot about filming during the process of constructing our media product. Especially the necessity for a camera tripod, filming freehand is good for adding point of view shots or shaky scenes but when filming a normal sequence freehand shots usually make the shot seem amateur and unprofessional.

Camera Equipment:

Strengths -

• As the camera had a pop out screen we were able to review the footage instantly after we filmed it, this meant that we were able to identify if anything was wrong with the scene we had just shot.

• We were able to perform most of the shots we wanted even the focus pull scene after a lot of practice.

Weaknesses -

• The quality was not as good as it could of been if we had used a professional camera, especially the audio which was below average.
• Though we managed to perform the focus pull scene, it was very difficult to actually get it to work properly, using professional equipment would of enabled us to perform a more defined split on the focus allowing the viewers attention to be fully diverted to where it was focused.

 

Click the above picture to see a rough example of the focus pull that we have in our media product, it is not as smooth as the final piece.(if it doesn't work your web host may be blocking it)

Problems with filming:

As we filmed our first opening twice and our final one once, me and my group partner had gained a lot of filming, planning and setting experience. Our problems started in our first filming process were lighting was a major issue, we had to light candles and hold lots of torches to try and gain as much light as possible in the dark setting.

Again during the first filming we were very disorganised, this meant that shots would have to be taken many times in order to get them right and we lost track easily as we didn't follow our storyboards. When got to the editing stage we found that the pictures were very grainy and even though it did add to the mise en scene, some shots were almost pitch black. Also, because we weren't following our storyboards it became very difficult to piece the story together.

To solve these problems, during the second filming process I made sure we used a halogen flood light and tried to follow the storyboards in order to not repeat what we had previously filmed.

This time when we came to editing we found that some scenes were too light some still too dark, this made the opening look very unbalanced and unprofessional. This is when me and another member of the group decided to part from the others due to disagreement.

Editing in Imovie:

Personally, I felt Imovie was too simple to be able to perform all the effects that we wanted to include in our production, on more than occasion there was not a suitable alternative on the software. For Example: overlaying two pieces of footage or positioning titles with certain effects.

Even though Imovie lacked features it was very easy to use, this was very beneficial as we were under pressure to get it finished as we had restricted time on the Apple Macs.

Sourcing music from the internet:

We found it quite difficult to find music that not under copyright and that was free which fitted in with our opening.


We searched the internet, using Google, browsing many sites listening to different types of music. We chose the piece we did because we felt that it really complemented our shots and made the whole scene very dramatic, capturing the character that we wanted to display.We also spent a great deal of time aligning certain shots to change and appear with specific times in the background music. I felt strongly about making sure they were in sync even though it was quite time consuming the end result proved effective.