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

After this project I have improved in many technical areas of creating a sequence and have also learnt very new concepts.

Hardware

·         I can fully operate a Sony Dx800 camera including adjusting manual focus and exposure settings which proved to very useful when filming our sequence

·         I have learnt how to use external recording equipment such as our shotgun microphone and am able to use headphones to listen to the audio being recorded.

·         I can now use a pag light to effectively improve the look of a certain shot and add to the warmth of it

Software

• We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit and construct our whole sequence
• I can now very confidently use multiple audio and video tracks in order to layer certain tracks over each other maximising the creative possibilities we had.
• I can quickly capture any footage off of our camera due to the ease of using a shot log and visual cues in our uncaptured footage.
• I can now use all the EQ settings in Adobe Premier Pro to cut out unnecessary high tones and boost lower frequencies to produce as nice a sound as possible in our audio tracks
• I used Adobe After Effects to try and track motion in some shots so that we could stick titles to surfaces. Although this was not used in our final sequence due to problems with finding tracking points I did manage to learn how it was done which will be useful when working on similar projects in the future.

Other

• Having the role of director I can now direct a shot professionally by organising everyone including actors and camera operators.
• Having used blogger throughout the production process I have become very good at all technical aspects of blogging such as embedding videos and writing html codes to adjust page layouts.
• We used youtube very often to upload all our videos, this included our rough cuts, final sequence and behind the scenes videos
• We used Facebook to communicate about issues such as shooting dates and allocating tasks
• 
  We learnt to use the tripod in many new interesting ways. It was used for a few normal steady pan shots but was also used as an extension when filming track shots up the stairs

Overall

• Although I already knew about most of the technical aspects of filming and editing I am now able to do these much more efficiently and probably a lot better than before.
• Working with manual focus and exposure settings was a first and was really interesting because it definitely made our sequence noticeably look nicer. 
  
  
• If I was ever doing this project this again I would experiment further with tracking motion and manual camera settings. By clearly placing tracking points in each shot tracking motion would be a lot easier and we could try focus pulling to create variety in shots. 


• If i were advising other groups i would advise them to all be ambitious when using software and hardware because even if it ends up not working it is a very rewarding experience. Our tracking motion with titles turned out not to work but our use of manual focus and exposure worked very well