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

The process of creating our opening was a very lengthily process, one that was much more complex that I had first expected. I think that overall the thing that took the most time which I had not expected was  the filming itself, in order to get the correct shots and angles it took a long time and multiple different shot takes; that added with the editing made for many hours of film making. From the process of having made the opening to the film I now look at the Film industry very differently, and have realized that the process is not simple and appreciate the aspects that go into a film much more. The main technologies that i learnt about in making our product were Imac and Imovie. Before having joined a level media I had never had a chance to use an Imac before, when I first began to use it I was clueless and did not even know how to turn it on.  However, I learned quite quickly with the help of peers how to use it, and when we began to use Imovie it realized I had much more to learn. On I movie I learnt how to do multiple things. Firstly, the tool in which I found most useful was the clip trimmer tool. This tool enabled continuity of clips, it allowed shots to flow from one to another much more easily. The shots in which this tool was particularly helpful was the stairs scene and the scene of Jay running down the alley. By using the clip trimmer tool we were able to cut quickly back and forth from shots which sped up the pace of the opening, increasing the tension which we would not have been able to create as effectively without clip trimmer. Another very useful technique I learnt to use on Imovie was the ability to put music over the top of film clips. At first I had no idea how to do this and had expected that it would be quite complicated to do but I soon discovered that the process of getting music onto iTunes and then over the top of whatever clips I needed was very easy.  We used this technique in our anematic, blood testing video and our final opening, so it ended up being very useful. I also learnt how to speed up and slow down the speed of shots, this again came in very handy when editing all of the videos that our group made. I learnt that slowing down shots (for example the shot where Jay drops his gun) can effectively add tension, and speeding up shots could effectively used to speed up the pace. Using Imovie we were also able to create an Anematic from our final storyboared, this acted as a great help when filming because it allowed us to film the exact shots that we needed, below is the anematic we created using Imac with the actual shots we filmed over the top, I thought of creating this because i thought it would be a good way of seeing how useful our anematic actually was during the filming process;

Another piece of technology that I learnt to use in the process of creating our product was the video cameras. I had never used a video camera in the past, but they were also very simple to operate once we had been shown how. I did not ever understand fully the difference between HD cameras and normal cameras before, not knowing how much the quality of the two differed our group used a non-HD camera for our first filming session because a HD camera had not been available and we were eager to begin the filming process; however when we uploaded our footage onto the Imac we discovered that it was of very poor quality.  We had dimmed our shots to add to the grimey vibe of the opening however we found that this made the quality even worse and the image because very grainy.  It then became apparent that we would have to use a HD camera to re-film the footage. This had a great impact on our filming because it meant that we had lost a weeks’ worth of filming, it set us back greatly. Once we had a HD camera we re-filmed the stairs scene, and the original footage we had filmed worked as a test shot source and we were able to film the scene much more effectively adding in shots that differed from ones we had originally filmed to make it look more effective. We successfully re-filmed the footage, improving it with new shot angles, however when we again tried to dim the shots we found that the image began to get grainy again therefore decided to stick with the natural light and not use a dimmer. 


The video below demonstrates some of the difficulties we faced during filming;