Evaluation 6

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

In the production of our opening sequence I learnt many new skills that were essential for creating this product.  I used many pieces of hardware throughout such as the Canon 550D and the iMac which had software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects that we used for the editing process. As with some of these things I had little knowledge about them so was faced with some problems but overcame them in the end to get the best outcome of our film.

For the filming of our opening sequence we used a Canon 550D which was a camera I had never used before and a much more advanced camera then the camcorders and flip cams I had used previously. After much practice this piece of equipment became a lot easier to use where we could incorporate a variety of shots and good framing. During our preliminary task I learnt about specific rules such as the 180-degree rule and the rule of thirds, which we could incorporate into our production.

Final Cut Pro is a program, which I had used vaguely before so I knew the basic commands to edit footage on a simple level but then learnt about the software in much more depth in lesson and throughout the creation of our opening sequence. I learnt how to adapt the key-frames of footage, change sound levels, add transition effects and many other small touches in order to create a sleek, smooth running final version of our production.

Adobe After Effects was software I had never previously used before which is used to create refined motion graphics and cinematic visual effects. This program was used in our production to create the titles that come at the end of our opening sequence and also the names of the people who worked on it. As I new very little about this software, YouTube tutorials were needed to gain a more in-depth knowledge on it, I also had to ask friends who knew how to do particular things in order to proceed in various parts. 

The website Blogger.com was one which I had used before but found it hard to stay on track with it although during the production of our opening sequence it became a very helpful tool in saving pieces of coursework, research, videos etc. This was also helpful for people to view my work so I could get feedback from classmates and my teacher in order to improve my work.

There were some problems when using technology during the making of this production including, not having enough desktop space when first rendering the film on final cut so all the work had to be moved on to a hard-drive. Having three members in our group also meant we had to hand each over a lot of info and footage from computer to computer so we used a hard drive to swap video footage large files, email was used for more basic files.


In conclusion I have learnt that before this course my basic knowledge on media has expanded a whole lot and have learnt many new skills in order to create a well constructed opening sequence that was very high quality with the use of expensive equipment such as the Canon 550D and the iMac computers.