What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
Technological difficulties
Throughout the filming and the editing of our film we encountered a variety of technical difficulties. For instance the camera which we used when filing produced some shaky footage, this was first likely due to the fact that a lot of the shots that was filmed needed to be filmed at an angle that using a trip-pod could not achieve, this meant that we would have to film holding the camera. the second issue we had was at some points the camera struggled to focus on different areas in some shots. This issue was likely due to the lighting of the area where we filmed, this area was fairly dark and the light bulbs produced a standard and slightly dim yellow light instead of a bright white light. However the lighting that we had was the lighting that we needed but the reason for the camera struggling to focus on some points was because the dark background against a dim yellow light meant that the camera couldn't really distinguish distances in the shot because all the colours were similar.
what hardware and software did we use?
when producing our horror film we used a various amount of different hardware and software.throughout the whole process we used apple macs and we had quite good success with them e.g. they were easy to use and reliable but they did have some draw backs for example they lack complexed software and editing tools which limited the quality of our work. When filming we used a handheld nikon camera, the camera was good in many ways as it produced a standard quality of footage (720p) and was very easy to use and understand even though we hadn't used it before. The camera did come with some disadvantages such as it struggled to focus in certain shots and had poor battery life but this was likely to not being charged fully pre filming. When making our film company logo's we opted to use 'Pixlr' which is a free online image editing software, we had very successful results using the website as it allowed us all the complexed tools to produce a professional logo. The one issue with 'Pixlr' is that if you haven't had previous experience with the software then it can become quite hard to use and navigate.
When it came to actually editing our movie intro we used iMovie which is a piece of software which is pre-installed on most if not all Apple Macs. IMovie is fairly basic video editing software that allows users to use a variety of editing tools to change the footage which has been shared to the software. When we used IMovie we all found it fairly simple to use and for the most part we were able to create what we wanted with the tools at hand, however our only issue with the software was that because it is a pre-installed software it is fairly basic and does not offer the amount of video editing tools that more professional and complex editing software can offer. This meant that even though we were able to create what we wanted for the most part we were quite limited in the tools that were available to use to make what we wanted using IMovie.
Did you realise so much work went into creating similar media products?
Yes we did understand the work and complexity of producing a professional horror film intro before we even started filming.We had all previous worked in the production of filming and knew all the different elements that went into the making of the film e.g. taking various amounts of the same shot and understanding the importance of in-depth planning and research to produce the best quality of footage we could.
Olly Canning and Zak Bakouras