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

The process of creating this film opening has further expanded our knowledge about technologies, such as using Final Cut Express, Garage Band and handling equipment such as Camera's and Dolly's.

Final Cut Express

Previously, we had used Final Cut Express for our animatronics, so we were fairly familiar to the basic concepts of it. However, our knowledge expanded during the process of creating our film opening. Despite this, we faced a number of problems. We were not familiar with the editing techniques of the program and struggled with speeding a shot up. We then decided that the best option was to do some research to find out how we could speed the shot up and found that it was fairly simple but were not able to add the affect if the clip was short. This meant that we had to lengthen the clip which was not an ideal thing to do because it made the film even longer.

We were also unaware of how to make a clip pause. When the title is shown, we wanted to add a pause to show that this is a poignant moment in the film opening where things are going to completely change. However, we had never tried adding this affect and encountered a few problems whilst trying to. We then had to search on the internet how a freeze frame could be added and found that it was simple. It required the playhead to be on any frame which we wanted to 'freeze' and following had to be clicked:

We eventually got the outcome we wanted, and happily learnt how to create a freeze frame.

One other problem, that we came across was dealing with the sound levels. Removing sound from clips was simple, however, we found it difficult to alter the sound level to make it either quieter or louder. With the help of the internet, we learnt how to do so and learnt another valuable technique.

The last problem we faced was deciding what affect would be ideal to portray a dream sequence. As Final Cut Express does not have a preview of the affects on a clip without actually applying it, this meant that a lot of time was consumed by adding an affect, and removing it, and so on.

Furthermore, I learnt some other techniques, such as:

- Editing the length of clips.

- Adding, removing and altering sound.

- How to add layers of sound.

- Applying special affects and speed level of clips.

And a number of others.

Garage Band

The process of creating music for our film opening also played an important role in building our knowledge of creating a film opening. As we could not use music from artists, for example the ones from our research which we thought would be ideal for our opening, we had to create a piece of music of Garage band. With hardly much experience on Garage band, it took us a while to get the hand of things. We decided that playing around with the beats etc, would be the ideal thing to do. After a lengthy process and a tight deadline, we created a soundtrack that fitted the moods of both the dream sequence (excitement and happiness) , and the getting ready routine (panick and emotion).

Film Equipment

Although my group and I had initial experience with filming from previously, we still encountered a few problems whilst filming. In some of our shots in Central London, we found it difficult to maintain a steady and smooth filming process with the dolly due to large crowds trying to make there may through the area. This consumed a lot of time, but we then decided to use handheld shots instead, but this obviously was a little unsteady. Once we started the editing process we realised that the unsteadiness of the shots was not as bad as we thought, and created a sense of atmosphere and excitement in the shots.

Furthermore, in our preliminary task, I learnt that the verisimilitude of our film was vital and that different techniques influenced this. We learnt about techniques such as the 180 degree rule, shot-reverse-shot and match on match action. In our preliminary task, we struggled with continuing the 180 degree rule throughout the whole filming process, but we made sure that this mistake did not occur again in our film opening task. We did this by placing objects on the floor to act as a guide of which side the had to film from.

Other Technology:

The use of internet which enabled us to download new fonts made our film effective for representing our genre, romantic comedies. In the past, I've used the website 'www.dafont.com' numerous times before in order to get away from the traditional fonts we usually come across and be a bit more creative in other pieces of work I have done. In our process of finding the right font from the traditional fonts on the Apple Macs, I remembered the website and immediately decided to test whether adding the font 'Comic Andy' from this website onto the font book, would mean that it would be accessible on Final Cut Express. Thankfully, it was and we believe it really helped us portray the genre, but also be attractive to our target audience.

Some other equipment my group and I used consisted of a tape recorder. This was needed to record our voiceover as our protagonist introduces herself, and we found this was fairly simple. However, speaking loud and clearly into the microphone was vital and this affected how the amount of times we had to re-record it. We also had to overcome the problem of finding a quiet area in the school to record, where we would not be disrupted.