YM- EVALUATION (6)

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

Throughout the process of this project I have learnt many things in terms of technology. The main things being, blogging, filming and editing as prior to this project I had no experience in any of these areas.

Blogging was introduced to me as a completely new way of communicating and recording our progress. Blogging presented many challenges for me, not only learning how to navigate the blog itself but knowing the right way to present the blog and my individual posts. It took time to understand that writing in an essay format wasn't how blogs work, and that bullet pointing and using colour, highlighting and the bold key was the way to emphasise a point. Also, using images and videos to back up what I was saying in my posts was something new to me too.

Collaborating through the blog with the other members of my group was extremely important and something I had never done before. To begin with we were confused as to how collaborating through the blog would be possible, however before long we discovered commenting on each others posts was the most effective way. This meant we could keep up to date with what each other was doing while presenting our own ideas.

The filming of the product was another major learning curve in the process of making our opening sequence. Having never used a camera in this way before, it took several goes at many of our shots to get the positioning of the shot how we wanted it, especially because there were many aspects we need to bear in mind too. For example, the rule of thirds and the 180 degree rule. These things helped us use the camera in the best way so that the composition of each shot was the best it could be.

Personally for me, the final learning curve, editing, was the one I found hardest to get to grips with because I had never used a piece of software even remotely similar to that of Premier. This factor meant that I wasn't familiar with all the names of effects the software offered which made it hard for me to use and really quite intimidating. Editing things like the brightness, saturation and contrast was something I managed to do really easily, as well as playing with the chroma key to wipe away the blue screen we had put in place while filming the interior shots.

We had to go through all the footage we uploaded to our timeline and go through it all, to perfectly create continuity editing, to make the opening sequence look smooth.

Anchoring the soundtrack to the footage so it fit perfectly proved to be a difficult task, especially as the point where the music drops in our soundtrack had to fall at one specific point in our project to give the right feel and atmosphere to the running sequence. The task of fading the music in and out however, I found to be surprisingly easy.