Question 6

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

Through our project we have learned and developed numerous new and existing skills in relation to filming and editing, as well as the production of our film gained us an insight into how to adequately research what we needed.

I used various programs and applications throughout this project, including web applications such as Sliderocket and Prezi; these helped me display my findings on the conventions and general research in a visual way and not just through text. I also used programs on the Mac such as LiveType for adding the titles onto our work, and iMovie to actually construct the movie and edit our recorded shots.

When filming I used a camera with a tripod at all times, which allowed me to develop my knowledge on getting shots framed well and creatively due to the ability to customize the height and angle. We also used the HD camera which allowed us to get more high quality shots and learned how to use it.

When constructing our film we used iMovie to edit our footage. We uploaded our shots from the camera onto the computer using the memory card reader, and then proceeded to put them in order in a new iMovie project and then cut them down and rearrange them to our liking. After that we learned how to use LiveType in order to create and implement our titles, this was new software like many of the other applications so it was interesting to learn how to import and implement features created in one program into another.

Using Photoshop I learned many new effects and skills when creating the film logo and production logo, such as how to make a starry type background from scratch by purely using brushes and filters from the application.

I used my pre-existing skills in web development (namely HTML, CSS and JavaScript) to create a script which allowed us to type out sentences in a matrix-style terminal application window to look like the computer was speaking to the character in our film.

Finally I used web applications such as Prezi and SlideRocket to display my findings and productions creatively online rather than just explaining it through text posts. It enabled me to attach images and videos alongside the text which made it much clearly and helped me to get my point across as images explain the point better than words.