What have you learnt about Technologies from the process of

constructing this product?

Stephanie Quinn

Group & EquipmentHere is a picture of the Macs that we used in order to make our film opening. On the Macs we did many things such as edit our Film Opening on Final Cut Pro. We also did a lot of our research, and journal posts from them. The Mac were important as this is when we learnt how to do many things that we didn’t know how to do before such as many Final Cut Pro skills (adding effect, cropping videos and even importing our footage into the software.

This is a picture that was taken on our filming day when we were at the location that our film opening was set (Antonia’s House). At this point I was setting up the camera for a shot which was filmed in Antonia’s kitchen. In this shot we can see that I (Steph) am focusing the camera and getting it into the correct position. During our filming I learnt a lot about filming and how to do properly focus a camera and where the best places to put it were.

Post – Production

One of the first things that we had to do once we had finished production on our film opening was to come up with a company ident which we ended up creating on an app called ‘PicsArt’. On the app, you are able to pick all different tools for editing and creating images. The first thing that we had to do was pick a background, which we chose to be a black / worn type of effect. We then picked a font which was clear and easy to read but also gave off the connotations that we wanted it to. Finally after all our research on other company idents we decided that we need an image element to ours therefore we found this shape that looked like a thorn and put it under the title of our ident as it represents the name.

Post – Production (2)The next thing to do after filming was to import all of our footage onto Final Cut Pro and choose what shots we would like to have in our final product and what shots were either bloopers or not good enough, this is when I learnt that you could favourite different clips to narrow down it to the ones that you want to use. As well as this in Final Cut Pro, I also learnt a lot about editing clips and the easiest ways to cut clips down so you just got the sections that you needed.

Another technique that I learnt while using Final Cut Pro was how to insert visual effects and sound effects into my product. When it came to effects we had to add a filter over the top of our shots in order to make the darkroom look like an actual darkroom and as though the lights were not on in that room. This turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it was going to be as we could edit the opacity of the red filter so it could be as dark or as light as we needed. I also found out that you could save your custom made effects so that they were easy to find again later if you needed the same effects for another clip. As well as this while playing around with Final Cut Pro and finding effects that we thought would work, we learnt how to overlap two different clips and change the opacity so that you could see two shots at the same time.

Finally one of the last things that I learnt how to do while using Final Cut Pro was how to add sound and sound effects to our film opening in order to create the tension that we needed. Sound was a key element to our final product as we needed the non diegetic music over the top so that we could create tension but we also needed sound effects, e.g. the doorbell ring as diegetic sounds that the characters needed to hear. Adding sound was very easy technique to learn as you just had to search and drag the music onto the timeline.

Research / Planning / Evaluation

When it came to research, planning and evaluation there were many different websites that I used in order to help me achieve this:

• Prezi: I used prezi as a place to create slideshows when it came to some of my tasks.

• PowerPoint: I also used power point as a way to create slideshows for some of my tasks

• Slide Share: I used slide share in order to upload my power points onto mahara

• Survey Monkey: I used survey monkey as a way to get people I knew but I might not see often to answer some questions for my research regarding my film opening.

• Mahara: I used Mahara as a place to put all of my research into one place.

• DaFont: I used DaFont as a place to research into different types on fonts and to find ones that I thought might be appropriate for my film opening.

• IMDb: I used IMDb in order to look up details of different thriller movies that might have inspired my film opening.

• Final Cut Pro: I used final cut pro in order to edit together my film opening.

• YouTube: I used YouTube to upload my film opening and my prelim task to and also used it as a way to gather feedback.

• Picsart : I used Picsart as a way to create our company ident for our film opening.