Evaluation Question 6 : What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the project I have learnt to use and revisited the use of many technologies during the task. As we shared out the jobs equally between the group I got a good go at editing, filming, research and design work. The main technology to mention is the blogs. Having not done a blog before I have learnt about constructing posts and creating an easily accessible blog. It has helped with presenting research and contacting the group greatly and was a generally enjoyable way of expressing our work, both individually and as a group.

Throughout the filming process we used a Canon mini HD camera with a boom mic attached. Although we did not film in HD it was a high quality camera which made the editing process easy as we could do a lot with the clips. We used headphones with the camera so that while recording sound we could make sure there were not any faults that the human ear might not pick up on. This greatly reduced the need for reshoots and the amount of takes. For our project as we were mainly outside we used the studio lighting kit. This was also a new experience and I learnt about how to assemble the lights and the use of filters (e.g. we used a blue filter to replicate the effect of moonlight). Simple problems that I have learnt to deal with is the charging of batteries for camera which takes a lot longer than we first thought it would, and also about leaving the lights to cool down as we almost burned ourselves on them a couple of times. Another thing I learnt about is the use of tripods, how to position them properly and how to use them for certain shots, especially pans, which are very difficult handheld.

I have learnt about transporting equipment as well. We had to make sure that whoever was taking the lighting kit could get a lift home as it was very heavy. The rest of the kit was all very portable and was easy to move around with us.

To edit our project we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. Having used Windows Movie Maker for my GCSE media product, I had to learn to use the program from scratch. I learnt about using multiple timelines and audio tracks and how to use non-linear editing, in which we could edit the sequence in whatever order we wanted. I learnt how to use lots of the audio and visual effects such as the three-way colour corrector which allowed us to change the brightness and contrast of our clips (making them more filmic) and also lower the saturation. This tool also came in handy when the sky was slightly red on our reshoot weekend, so we could change the tint to make it fit the rest of the sequence. I learnt how to cut clips using the razor and link them together for better matches on action. Also using the source monitor to watch back original and edited clips at the same time was very useful to compare our work to the original source. I also learnt about keyframing which we used to edit the sound levels and for transitions such as fades.

To make the "Eyeless Productions" logo we used Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Fireworks CS3. I have used both of these programs before but I learnt about using the filters such a glow and halftone dots to create odd distortions on a simple image. I also learnt about layering so that different parts of the photo can be moved individually without editing the finished product.