Evaluation Question 6

Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

(This is the equipment I used to film my opening. I used a Sanyo camera and tripod.)

At first I found using the camcorder and tripod difficult as I had to re-position the equipment for almost every shot and had to constantly make sure that the angles and lighting were correct. However once I got the hang of it, I found the camera a lot easier to use. My actress helped my with the positioning of some shots and was good at listening to my directions. Therefore this was useful and helped to make things run more smoothly. Moving the tripod around was mostly fine, apart from in places where the conditions were muddy or unstable as it was difficult to position the tripod in a way where it would stand up safely and not get damaged. When I first attempted to use the camera I found it very confusing and difficult to work, however as soon as I actually got to the filming location and had a go at a few practice shots, everything was completely fine from then on. 

The Mac computers were very useful to me for this project in the fact that they provide a variety of advanced programs that normal PC computers don't. However throughout the project I found the macs difficult to use as I have always used a normal PC therefore it was very difficult for me to adjust to the way the macs work and it took me time to know my way around them. I had some experience of using the macs from my GCSE media course though and this helped me a lot and prevented me from being completely hopeless and new to using macs. The fact that we used macs for our whole project meant that it was often difficult for me to transfer files to my normal computer so I could continue work outside of school. This was due to the file types being too different or my computer not having the ability to use the same programs that the macs use. However I got round this by doing all my Final Cut or Live Type work in school on the macs and doing all my extra blog work at home on my regular PC. 

I got the hang of how to use Final Cut pretty quickly and was able to easily put my shots into a timeline and begin to edit them. I found transitioning the shots quite difficult and putting filters on shots was very hard as some of them looked too similar to the original shot and others too artificial. The problem I found with Final Cut is that having to constantly render my film every time I made a small change was very time consuming and it wasted a lot of my time as I had to sit and wait and was unable to make any further changes on Final Cut until my film was all fully rendered. 

I struggled to use Livetype at first as I often found it difficult to fill the font in the correct colour and if I made a change it was hard to undo it without the font changing too much or looking odd. However I got the hang of it after a while and I used it to successfully make all of my titles. I used the typewriter effect for most of my titles and I struggled to match the speed in which these appeared on the screen as I had to make so many of them and they were all such different lengths. This problem often involved me importing the font to Final Cut and then having to go back to the Livetype file later and edit it as it was either typed on screen too quickly, or too slowly, compared with the rest of my titles. I struggled to import my Livetype fonts onto Final Cut and to make them appear in the position I wanted on the screen, but after playing around for a while I managed to successfully place my first title over the shot I had chosen and from then on I had no trouble with importing fonts to Final Cut. 

Before this project I had never used either Slideshare or Soundcloud. Slideshare I found very simple to use from the first time I used it, it was the embedding it on to my blogger account that I struggled with. For some of the things I uploaded to blogger I had to change the format from "Compose" to "HTML" for the link to appear successfully on my blog page. I didn't know this at the start and some of the files I uploaded to Slideshare/Soundcloud only appeared on my blog as a link and not as the actual file. However once I knew about changing the format of my post to 'HTML' then I could upload things easily. I found Slideshare and Soundcloud useful as they allowed me to upload things on to my blog easily and in a better format than just attempting to upload a powerpoint or sound file straight from my computer documents. Both these websites were very useful with their "embed" links and these allowed me to easily copy and paste my files straight on to my blogger account effectively. I would definitely use both of these programs again in the future. 

YouTube was useful to me throughout this project. I created my own YouTube account to use for this and I used it frequently. The website was very useful when I filmed my feedback on the rough cut of my film. I uploaded the files straight from the camera on to YouTube and it worked very successfully with good quality images and sound. However YouTube caused me huge problems when it came to uploading my final film. YouTube kept on saying that the file type was not supported or when it did upload the film then it was blurry and poor condition. It took me many attempts to upload my final project on to the website and at one point I thought it wasn't going to work at all. Eventually though, I managed to make my film the correct file type and it uploaded successfully and had a good picture quality.