Evaluation - Q6

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

One of the main pieces of technology that I used throughout the project were the iMacs. The one main advantage about using these were that they had much better software than normal PCs whilst still being fairly easy to use. I found it quite easy to get used to the Macs throughout the project as I had worked with a lot before and I had used some of the software on them in previous media projects. Some problems that often occurred when using the Macs though were that the internet often dropped out, which meant that we had to upload a lot of our videos on PCs. Another problem was that it was hard for us to transfer different files as a lot of the time, the file types would only work on certain computers meaning that we would have to use Macs throughout the whole project which proved difficult when we wanted to work on some of it at home.

The main piece of software we used on the Macs was Final Cut. This was my first time working with Final Cut and so I found it quite difficult at first to get used to it. One of the main things I found difficult when using Final Cut was trying to find the right effects to fit with the right sort of atmosphere that we wanted for our film as a lot of the time, the effects were either too in your face or hardly noticeable at all. What I learnt from this is editing the effects with the more advanced options meaning we could reduce and change certain aspects of each of the filters to fit with the style we were looking for.

Another piece of software that I hadn't used before on the Macs was LiveType. I have LiveType particularly difficult due to the wide variety of options and not knowing what any of them did. One main problem that I had was that I found it difficult to get the right speed and length for all of my titles and then replicate this for all of them throughout so it had good continuity. I also learnt how to download fonts on to the computer through dafont.com as the fonts on LiveType weren't any that we wanted and didn't really fit the conventions of a normal supernatural horror title. Another thing I learnt when using LiveType was how to export the titles on to Final Cut. I found this quite difficult at first as the positioning of the titles once exporting sometimes didn't look right with what was happening in the scene but after a few adjustments and some help, I found it quite easy and were able to get the effective titles that we wanted.

Some online technologies that I used were SlideShare and SoundCloud. These were really helpful when wanting to set out my work in different more interesting ways. Before I started this project, I had no idea what SlideShare was and so this was a site that I have really learnt to use and something that I will now be able to use in the future. I learnt how to upload presentations on SlideShare and the embed these onto Blogger which I also found difficult to begin with because I didn't know how to make the presentations to show up on my blog as the presentation and not a link.

The last and one of the most important pieces of technology I used was the camera. At first, my partner and I used a camera which didn't look very good in low lighting as we had a grainy effect on all of the shots when we looked back at them on the computer. This was really frustrating as it meant filming them all again with a different camera which would work well in low light. This taught me to always check our shots on a computer before we carried on filming with the same camera.