Evaluation Activity 6

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

When learning about the technology we had to use when editing our opening scene, i honestly did not know how to use Adobe Premiere Elements. At the start of the course this was seen as a downfall as we had to learn how to use it as we went through the course. We depended a lot on our own initiative as well as teachers comments and guidance through using effects and transitions. However, despite our lack of advanced ability, we were able to produce a film or high quality standard. Towards the end of the course, Adobe Premier Elements became quite straight forward and easy to use, providing us with all the basic components required to successfully edit our opening scene to our film. The most useful tool was being able to cut and match the footage, making our shots clean and reducing the potential jump cuts.  It also allowed us to edit and mix the audio, adding different soundtracks in to match the mood and emotion we were trying to create at different points in the scene. We also admired the option of creating titles for our production credits as well as our opening title, Follow Your Tracks. Transitions were also a major part in creating a successful opening scene as we mainly used the fade in and fade out options for our opening credits to make it look as professional as possible. Admittedly at first it was quite frustrating and difficult to get the hang of it, leading to myself having to use trial and error to get the outcome i wanted, but after a while the editing tools were especially efficient which helped greatly as it allowed the titles to look professional and sophisticated. I think that this was one of the key factors in raising the standard of our film, and I think our production credits were my favourite aspect to our opening. Unfortunately due to our camera having HD definition quality, our computer was not efficient enough to render our software, which made it really difficult to edit our flaws and notice our strengths, as when playing back our film, it was constantly slow and jumpy, this led to a very stressful process as scenes often had the tendency to disappear, we eventually managed to construct our final piece.

The camera we decided to use for our opening scene was a Canon 1200D with 1080p HD movie recording. This was a very strong point as it made the quality of film very professional and clear. As the camera was my own, i had a lot of experience and knowledge with the features it had, making it very easy to film our scene. Using manual focus, we were able to change the depth of field, so we could blur the background and have a very sharp focus on the characters or the other way round due to preference of what was happening in the scene at the time. This also played a big part in making our film successful as our film looked very sophisticated rather than an average standard project. In some shots it would have been more sensible to use a tri-pod as it would've allowed us to create steady shots which were better quality than without a tri-pod. Despite this, we liked the fact that unsteady shots could resemble the antagonists view, watching and following the victim
Hopefully, through our on going knowledge, we have opened up wider opportunities for any future products, which will come in handy if we carry on media next year. If this is the case, we will need to explore more techniques and features to further increase our knowledge and ability.