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

Research:

In my research, I used a variety of websites in order to gather information and inspiration for my piece. I did a lot of reading on websites such as Wikipedia, Cyber College and Time Out. These proved very useful for researching things like filming techniques influential professional productions, possibly because many of the articles had been written by fellow film makers or other such experts. I also made great use of Youtube throughout my research. I learnt that this was an incredible source of media and it proved invaluable for watching other film extracts and its ability to embed video into my blog. I did, however, find that a shortcoming of much user generated material is that it is not always reliable. I also found that a lot of footage on Youtube is posted without consulting copyright, making it illegal. In hindsight, I should have checked how trustworthy the uploads to the websites I used were.


Filming:

I filmed my piece on a Sony Mini-DV camera, fixed on a tripod. I learnt to hold a shot steady, as well as tracking characters through scenes. I found using camera placement and the zoom function particularly useful when composing my shots and focusing on specific areas. I learnt that it was often better to use the manual focus on the camera, rather than relying on the auto focus, as it allowed me to have more control over which parts of the frame i was focusing on. I also made use of a Nikon D3000 Digital SLR camera to take stills and document the filming process. I did find using DV tape often meant footage became grainy, especially when using the zoom. If I were to repeat the project, I would try and use a different format for recording my footage.

Sound Production:

When composing my Original Soundtrack, as documented on my blog, I recorded it with the Ableton Live recording package, alongside my X-Station Synthesizer and Novation Launchpad software controller. I found using this software very easy as I was already familiar with it from previous music production. I then was able to upload my recorded ideas to the Internet using Soundcloud - a music streaming service. I learnt that this was very useful as it allowed quick uploads and almost instant streaming, as well as being able to embed files in my blog.



As well as my soundtrack, I also recorded some sounds to go into my film. I recorded these using a microphone into Audacity, a free music recording software, and then imported the sounds to Ableton to touch them up before adding them to my film. I found the Audacity program very easy to use. The microphone I used did produce a lot of background sound on the recordings. If i were to repeat the process, I would choose a better quality microphone to reduce background noise and static.

Editing:

The main editing program I used was iMovie. This proved very functional for simple processes such as importing footage, cutting clips, and adding basic transitions, sounds and effects. I felt, however, that my choice of editing package was perhaps a little weak in terms of variety of effects. A better choice may have been the more powerful program Adobe Premier, which features a far more professional range of tools.


Others:

Blogger. Speaks for itself. It has been ideal for presenting my ideas as well as keeping track of other media student's work was progressing. Perticularly useful features were the ability to embed images and video from the Web as well as from the collection stored on the computer.

Facebook. Was fairly useful for contacting actors and other collaberators in order to arrange to meet for shoots.

Quicktime and iTunes. Both were used for audio and video playback. I learnt that Quicktime was far better than iTunes at video playback simply due to quality. iTunes often produced video that appeared far too grainy, or was of the wrong aspect ratio or size.