Monday 1 June 2009

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

This is a picture of all the things i used to create my film opening. You can see what is there, a camera, a tripod, and a laptop. Other than that i didn't really need anything else. Firstly, there is the camera. We recorded our films in HD (High Definition) and it saves onto the cameras built in hard drive. Unfortunately, the camera only had an hour or two battery life, so we didn't have as much time as i would have liked to do multiple takes and stuff.

There is also the tripod, which i used to ensure the camera stayed still whilst filming, even though on the uneven ground it was hard hard to keep the shots flat.

There are also some headphones, which i needed so i could hear how much audio was being recorded on the camera, and could therefore tell people to speak up or be quieter, depending on what shot i was filming.

Finally, there is the MacBook, which i used for everything else. I used blogger to keep track of all my planning and thoughts on the sequence, and also general work was all saved on the blog as evidence that i had been doing some work.

I used Final Cut to edit the entire film, so i put all the footage onto Final Cut, and cut the 6 and a half minutes of footage down to about 1 and a half minutes. This involved watching all the footage, and deciding which shots i wanted to keep, and which were no good - then removing the bad ones and putting the ones i wanted in the right order to the film made sense.

I then had to create some music for my film. For this i used garageband. This took quite a long time as i am not very good with garageband, i can't make music, but i think what i ended up with worked quite well.

Despite not being able to hear it very well, i also have a heartbeat sound effect during the first bit of the sequence, that seems too quiet under the music, but that took ages to find. Many of the sound effect websites i tried. Other websites tried to make me pay for the sound effect, so after trying to find one for about 30 minutes, i eventually gave up and decided not to bother. I tried one last link and it gave me the one i used, it wasn't what i wanted, but it was better than nothing.

We also use YouTube a lot to put all of our videos on, our films are generally tagged CMDiploma, and whatever else people decide to put on. We do this so people can watch the videos shoudl they want to, it also makes it easier to show other people our work by having it on the internet, instead of having to carry a tape, or a DVD around with us simply to show people our work.