[EVALUATION] What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

From the creation of this media product, I have learnt a lot about the different technology used to create a film. This includes hardware, such as cameras and tripods, as well as software such as the Adobe Production Premium software package.

The Zoom H4 recorder

We used a range of different hardware in the creation of our film. The first, and most obvious, is the use of tripods and HD camcorders. These were used to record the footage for the film itself.  While working on our film opening, we found that camera microphones were very sensitive to wind, as some of our audio could not be heard over the wind and later had to be dubbed over to make the footage useable.

We also used a Zoom H4 digital recorder (seen right) in some of our earlier recordings. This allowed us to record the audio separately from the camera, meaning better audio quality. However, we found that the Zoom was quite difficult to set up, and the microphone stand was constantly dipping to make the microphone visible in the shot. Because of this, we eventually decided to stop using the Zoom, as it caused some difficulties while recording.

Adobe Premiere Pro being used on an iMac

An Apple iMac was used to edit the footage down. While editing, we found that iMacs were easy to use with SD cards, as the Mac has a built-in SD card reader. We also found that the Mac supports a number of different editing and video programs from the Adobe Production Premium software package.

Adobe Premiere was the main program we used to edit the video. Premiere is an editing program that allows footage to be imported, cut down and edited, including adding effects, transitions and titles. While editing the film, we found that we could have 2 clips on separate layers and crop the top layer down to make both clips visible. This allowed us to do some special effects, such as the scene where Scherbius appears from behind a pillar.

Our logo, created in the program Adobe Flash

We also found that we could import footage from Adobe Flash as a .swf file type. Flash is a vector-based image creation and animation program developed by the same company as Premiere, and is therefore cross-compatible with some files. I used Flash to design and animate the logo, which was then imported into Premiere as a .swf file type. This allowed the clip to keep the vector-based quality, but prevented some sections of the animation from working, meaning the clip was later exported as a .mov file instead. This also helped us find that some elements of Flash do not work in Premiere unless they are exported in a certain way.

We used a number of websites to help plan and create our media product. For example, we used a website called pickaface.net to create the actor portraits used in the planning sections of our film production. We also found that there were a lot of online resources for finding royalty-free audio clips, such as incompetech.com for royalty-free music and freesound.org for royalty-free sound effects.