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

During the production of our 3 films we learnt developed skills in 2 crucial parts of the filming process, the camerawork and editing. After the 2 pre-limenary movies we had become more comfortable, filming and knew which shots would be best for certain scenes. With the camera we found out you could manually change focus to give the depth of field to the main focus, we only found this out in the last stages of the film making though. We also used a tripod wheel attachment to make a tracking shot, but this wasn’t used in the final video because of limited time.

We already had some basic knowledge of Adobe After Effects, which we used in the credits.

But for actual film editing we had to learn Final Cut Pro, as it is the perfect program for it. We used it for audio editing and video editing and in the end compiling into a video file.

Final Cut Pro also has many features that came in handy in our work, like using transitions and special effects, e.g. fades to show passage of time. We also used tools like the splitter and roller, which allowed for easy cutting and lining up of the video to the music. Because we used other software the video ratios and resolutions were sometimes off, but using the video properties we easily modified the video resolution with-in the software. We also used Final Cut Pro to do audio editing as it allows modifying audio levels and sync video and audio.

After doing the first batch of editing we found out that we should always film more of a scene than needed, as you never know when you might need extra footage, because of audio timing or video lining up.

Later on in the production we started noticing that we had more video time than the limit 40 seconds more in fact, so we had to increase the speed of some sections which actually worked well with movie as it was a chase scene. We also had to take out some scenes that we liked to get it to the limit time.

We used the masking feature in Adobe After Effects to make the credits be in the video and interacting with the actors this gives a flare to the credits and making them a little more interesting for the viewer.

After doing the pre-limenary movies we noticed we were using mostly still camera shots, this think of made the movies boring, so we decided to have some first person and mobile shots for the final movie opening to make it more compelling and adding to it as it is a fast paced action sequence. We also noticed that filming this sequence would have been a lot easier if we had the allowance of multiple cameras as we had to repeat sequences like jumping of a tall wall 4 times to get each angle that we wanted, this certainly slowed down the film making and tired out the actors.

In conclusion we have learnt many new abilities via the using the camera and using the post production software, including changing depth of field, special effect credits, various types of shots, using a mobile tripod and many more