What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing your project?

During the project I ahve learnt a considerable amount about the technology used in the process of creating just an opening sequence. prior to the project I had never used any form of movie making program.

One of the main things for us was problems with the temprament of the software. We found that if the capacity of the footage was too large the software would find difficulty loading and keeping up to date with our edits, usually ending in it cutting out and us losing our work. From this even though obvious, it reinstated the importance of saving and documenting work through every stage as it would have initially saved us time and patience.

I think I also learnt the importance of getting to grips with the software initially and finding tools that would save time. One example of this being the slice tool. Up until the last week or so of editing our footage we did not know about it, but when we discovered it the time it saved us was invaluable. It allowed us to edit our footage much more efficiently.

Another important feature which we learnt was the colour correction. Many of our opening shots especially around the school appeared on screen with a yellow/ orange hue whilst others were too bright. The colour corection allowed us to edit the footage and make it look more realistic and in a similar light so the continuity was correct.

One of the most crucial things which we discovered was the importance of the tripod. As we found with the first shoot of our film intro, without a stedicam it was not possible to create smooth proffessional looking shots without the use of a tripod. Handheld didn't work in this instance. Once we had re grouped and re shot our film intro we realized how important the tripod was and how we should not have underestimated the importance of it.

With regards to sound we knew that the recording quality of the camera was not the best and from preliminary work in other projects found that sound from the footage shot sounded tinny and took away from the effort and quality of footage. With this in mind we chose to do a voice over and I believe it worked so much better. As the camera only had to record sound the quality was much better and the clarity meant it did not take away from the introductory sequence.