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

Part 1 of After Effects Tutorial

To begin with, I learnt how to use 'After Effects' animation software to create an animated logo for the production company. I had never used this program before and therefore had no knowledge of how to use it. So to learn, we watched a YouTube tutorial which taught us how to create a logo that looked more professional than just creating one on Photoshop.
 
Doing this involved creating a number of different compositions and solids and applying different effects and pre-sets to them to create our desired effect. Due to the length of time it would have taken to write out 'Paranormal Productions' in this animated font, we had to abbreviate it to P.P.

Interface of After Effects Animation Software.

The most important technology we used whilst creating our film was Premiere Pro editing software. By using this software I have learned how to import footage and audio to the sequence, edit footage and audio and how to use different editing tools for example:
The Track Select Tool moves all the clips at the same time so you don't have to move them individually which would have caused a problem for us due to the sound bridges we had made.
The Rate Stretch Tool changes the duration of clips and stretches them out and speeds them up or slows them down. I have also learnt how to move clips around on the timeline to put them in the right place.

The Razor Tool is used to cut clips to get rid of any unwanted footage from the clip whilst keeping the relevant, useful bits.

We also learnt how to create sound bridges using the tools to break up all of the continuous speech in the film. Without them, the dialogue was overpowering and a sense of continuity was not created. So we used sound bridges to introduce the speech from one clip underneath another clip to stop the film from having blocked images with speech and make it more interesting to watch. We also used them to show other character's reactions to what is being said, this was very useful when our character Effie was giving her long, scary speech. Sound bridges broke it up so it was not in one large chunk and showing the other characters reactions helped to build tension.  

Rendering is another technique which was useful to learn. It takes your footage and makes it run smoothly and adjusts it to make it a better quality. Premiere Pro informs you that your footage needs to be rendered by putting a red line above the clips in the sequence. Once you render the footage by going into 'Sequence' and clicking 'Render entire work area' the bar above the clips turn green to let you know it has worked successfully. This was one of the most important things to learn whilst editing together our film as without this, the footage and sound would be poor quality and wouldn't have smooth transitions making the overall film appear unprofessional. 

We also used a website called incompetech to find royalty free music and sound effects that would not raise copy right issues. We used this for the music at the beginning of the film opening and learned how to import and overlap the sound.

When filming our product, we used a JVC camera with a lens that allowed us to alter the focus and depth of field. We learnt how to use the camera efficiently to create effects and which camera angles and shots would be the most effective to use. For example, using over the shoulder shots and two shots to film conversations and close ups to create tension. We originally filmed the footage using a DSLR camera, but when we came to import the footage to a MAC the files became corrupted due to compatibility issues. Due to this, we had to re film everything on the new camera and to ensure that the same problem did not occur again, we did a test to check if the files would be compatible with the computer. Whilst constructing this product, we faced several problems involving corruption and compatibility which taught us that you should always test the cameras before filming the entire product to eliminate the risks.

To create the presentations for the film and the evaluation we used creative technologies like Prezi, slide share and voice overs to make them more interesting and interactive.

Finally, we used a audio voice recorder to record the sound of a child giggling from a website. We originally tried to clip convert the video to an Mp3 file, but due to the schools internet rules, it was blocked and we could not use it and due to the young age of the antagonist we could not convincingly create the sound ourselves. We used the same technologies to record a voice over for this evaluation.