Film Opening - 6. What did we learn about technology from the process of constructing our product?

In the process of using a wide variety of both new and old technologies in our media production, we have learnt a great deal. It has given us insight into how we would do things differently if we were asked to produce a similar product again.
We encountered many problems with technology, that we solved in different ways to ensure a good end result.
Use of Macs and PCs
One of our biggest problems was that we started off using both Macs and PCs. The way different editing programs saved files differed between the two devices, meaning that when we tried to transfer different sections from one to the other, the files would not open. We overcame this problem by transferring different shots and editing from the macs onto the PC. This took a lot of time, but helped, as we finally had all our production happening on the same style computers. If asked to do again in the future, i would definitely make sure we only used PCs as it simplifies post production an enormous amount considering we had three people working on the same thing.

The programs we used for our post production where:

• Adobe Flash - For animation of the title sequences and animation of text withing the title sequence.
• Adobe Photoshop - To produce the logo, and moving images in the title sequences
• Adobe Premier Pro - For our editing
• Final cut express - We tried using this for editing, but stopped due to its incompatibility with PCs
• iMovie - To convert files and view raw footage

               

The compatibility of Adobe programs with each other really helped in our production, as we could transfer  different parts of our production from one platform to another (this may have used the program Adobe Bridge)
How we used new and old Internet technologies


Internet resources we used were:

• YouTube - To research music and similar films
• Slideshare - To produce animatic and storyboard.
• A Microsoft Silverlight slide show - Another animatic and storyboard program.

YouTube was such a valuable tool for our production, saving an enormous amount of time in finding music for the film as all the music was readily available and searchable. If asked to produce a media product again, i would definitely use YouTube again, as it's the best resource for internet video research in my opinion.

Filming technologies
Our choice of camera was essential, as our film involved a wide variety of shots used in different ways.We chose a light, small handicam that shot in reasonably high definition. The camera was especially useful in the tracking shot, resulting in a product that looked authentic. We did have a problem with one of the tripods, resulting in slightly choppy panning shots, but this was replaced for different shots in order to keep them stable.

In conclusion, technology played a massive role in our film opening production, and we learnt a a great deal about it. There are definitely things we would do differently if asked to produce a similar film, but we are happy with the result achieved.