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

For our technology during production, we used a lot more than just a camera. Here is a picture and description of what we used:-

• Canon HV40 – This is the video camera that we used for shooting our sequence. It is a HD camera, however, we shot in SD. Since the beginning of the project, I have learnt how to change focus manually, and how to do focus pulls. It was very helpful as it is lightweight, very easy to transport and simple to use.
• Sony Mini DV Tape – This is the tape that we used to shoot our feature. They are 1 hour each in length, and we used 3 of them throughout the whole of our shooting.
• Tripod – Although many of our shots were handheld or foot height, we used the tripod for the pans, and the close-ups of people talking.
• Shotgun Microphone – As we were muting the majority of our shots, we only needed the microphone for the dialogue, on which we had the microphone on the setting ‘Shotgun’ which is best for dialogue as it picks up sound from mostly what is just in front of the microphone.
• Headphones – This allowed us to see if there was a lot of background noise. Although we used it during all shots, it was only really necessary during the shots for which we were keeping the sound.

During post-production, it was the first time I’ve used the editing software in a while (2-3 months) so brushing up on my skills was mostly what happened at the start of the project. Below is a list of the software and hardware we used when editing:-

Hardware

• Dell Computer w/ Cibox duel screen monitors – The dual monitors allowed us to view on the right screen the output, whilst edit the shots on the left screen. This saved a lot of time which would have been lost between switching screens of having it all on one screen.
• Microphone – We needed to dub a little bit of our sequence, so we used a microphone to get this voiceover and dialogue.
• Apple Macintosh – This was used for the software, iText.

Software

• Adobe Premiere CS3 – This is the biggest piece of software that we used as it is what we used to edit all of our sequence.
• Adobe After Effects – We used this for the gunshot as it was a lot easier to edit it there, rather than Adobe Premiere CS3.
• Action Essential Pack 2 – This was the action pack that we used to get the blood splats and the muzzle flares used to create the effect of someone being shot.
• iText – The titles from our sequence were created on this program.