Finlay McGow - Question 6

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

We used many different technologies throughout the process of this whole project. We had our hardware
-Video cameras

-Computers
-Tripods

Then we had our software
-Microsoft word
-Film editing software
-Photoshop
-Blogger
-Prezi
-Free music sites

All of these technologies play a big part in the production of this opening sequence. However they also provide normal people with the ability to produce films to a decent standard, so they can be based on their content rather than the quality. This leap in technology over recent years has closed the gap between the people who produce media and those who receive it.

There were a few difficulties that I came across with using some of these and that is mainly not getting your desired effect that you want. For example we had to change our project because certain camera shots did not come out as we desired them, such as lighting difficulties, if you look at our preliminary task you will see how the lighting was too dark and the actors came out in silhouettes. Other issue’s would be the amount of time it will take to do a bit of editing, obviously with more practice it will be easier, but starting out it does tend to seem very unfriendly to use. I felt this problem when trying to get the voice over the music to go in time with the film which took up a lot of time.

We then have all the presentation software, such as Prezi. Prezi is a new presentation format that makes a presentation more dynamic and hands on. It enables the person viewing the presentation to move more freely and zoom in and out, very similar to a virtual brainstorm. This technology I found very useful in presentation and I thought was great to get across my point to my viewer. However I found it slightly annoying to use and more time consuming as a result.

I did find that all this equipment we had available to us, became friendlier to use over time and you could constantly improve your skills. Because of this it makes you feel more confident that you are doing a good job therefore making you stress less than we did at the beginning, for example during our preliminary task. This meant your ideas were not so constrained to your ability to handle the equipment and it enabled you to actually produce what you had mind in mind without having to change too much.
The technology that we had in all was varied and fun to use. It gave us the accessibility to do what we wanted to a good standard and quality. I felt my experience of the equipment and software was good as I could do what I wanted after i had learnt the skills to use the properly.