Question 6

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

To compose our film, the camera we used was a Panasonic HDC - TM900. Before we started to film, it was important that we were all confident with how to use the camera, thanks to our preliminary task, we were all fairly skilled with using it. Strengths of the camera include HD recording and playback which we used, the camera could even record in 3D but we didn't have the facilities to support this. Something else that we were partically impressed with was the way the camera picked up sounds, some sounds that we didn't even realise were there, such as birds in the background of some speech sequences. It was brilliant for us that the camera had this sounds quality, as it really helped emphsise the rural setting. As a group, we are finding it hard to think of any weeknesses for this camera, but if we had to mention something we would say that it was not user friendly when you first begin to use the camera. This is becuase it was difficult to get a grip of the vast amount of settings, and how to use them if you haven't worked it before.

Within the filming process of creating our film opening, there were a few problems we faced, but we managed to over come them. The first and probably most significant of our issues, was the ever changing weather conditions on the day we chose to film.The natural lighting that our camera was exposed to, changed every few minutes as the sky was quite overcast. Obviously we could not stop weather, but we did try our best to over come this. Each shot we planned, we filmed over three times, this was so that in editing stages we had a good choice as to what clip to select, this allowed us to try match the lighting in the last clip to the next clip. Another significant issue was the uneven ground levels, this would not be an issue if we didn't need to use a tripod, but we did for our establishing pan shot. To over come this the only option that we had was not use the tripod, but to instead use hand held shots, not just for the pan, but for the whole film. We each took turns and filmed the opening pan, and we ended up having about ten, but this meant we had a good choice when selecting which one to use, and there was one that was very steady that finally went into the movie.

To log our work we used Blogger, before starting my AS Media Studies course i had never used this website before, but once i learnt how it all worked, i found it a really useful and clever way to display my work. Its good because you can access it on any computer with internet connection, so it doesn't even require programs such as Microsoft Word, which was really handy when i went away on holiday. I also like the fact that you don't have to worry about where to save your work, meaning no memory stick to try and remember, as you know all your work is safe and saved on Blogger.

In the editing stages we used an Apple Mac and the software of Final Cut Express to construct our movie. We had the choice from this software or Imovie, We chose Final Cut Express even though it is more difficult to use, because it has a lot more features than Imovie, and we wanted our film to look as professional as possible. As we weren't fully confident with the program or the Mac, we had to experiment with it, to teach ourselves how to use it, we learnt a lot doing this that we didn't know we could do. We were really pleased when we learnt how to take sound from one clip and put it in another, as there were some clips with unwanted sound, which when cut out, needed to be replaced with something. We also found lots of transitions which made our film run smoothly, such as fading in and fading out. I was surprised by how easy it is to add sound tracks to your film.