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

On the way to my final piece, the editing software is the area that I feel I have learnt most about; my opening makes use of shot alterations, such as sepia; many shot transitions that I have altered the length of to create the necessary atmosphere; much more editing in terms of cutting out sections of film; and also the alteration of speed of the shot. For all of the above, I have found the editing software iMovie perfectly adequate, as it has allowed me to manipulate all of my footage to exactly what I wanted. There are certain limitations I this software, such as only being able to speed up or slow down footage to a certain amount, but that would be expected, given that it is provided for free on macs computers, and there are ways around the problems as well, so I found iMovie right for this level of editing; if I wanted to produce anything longer, or more complex, I would find it a lot more limiting.

For the audio of my opening, iMovie was also fine for incorporating it, after finding the audio elsewhere; the song I have used comes from a website called “SoundCloud”, which allows new musicians to upload their music copyright and royalty free, and enables users of the website to download it, which was incredibly useful. If this technology had not been available to me, I would have created my own music in GarageBand. At first, I did experiment with creating my own music using the loops feature on the software, and there were many appropriate sounds and sequences of music on there, but I did find it limiting in that the way of recording music on to it wasn't very high standard, which would have dragged down the audio, and thus the entire feel of the opening. However, I have discovered how to use it for basic things; in fact, I have used it and iMovie to create the director's commentary for question one of the evaluation.

I have found social networking sites, such as Blogger, Vimeo, and Youtube, highly useful for my coursework; Blogger in particular has allowed me to document the process to the final opening easily and efficiently. I have also learnt how to embed clips from both Vimeo and Youtube successfully onto my blog; both of these video sites have been invaluable, both in uploading footage to Blogger, as well as for research purposes. In particular, I used Youtube to look up other effective film openings, to see what worked and what didn't, which has allowed me to create an opening that hopefully avoids many of the downfalls of other film openings. The downfall of Vimeo is the sheer amount of time videos take to upload; a 3 minute film could take two hours to upload, which posed problems when uploading the audience research and preliminary task, because a limitation on lesson time means it was hard to find enough time to put films up. However, for the actual opening I was using my own laptop, so this hasn't been a problem.

The final major technology I used to create my opening was obviously the camera itself; I was using a Canon HD camera, which was of high enough quality and complexity to allow me to film all of the footage that I needed to make the opening work. The only problem I had in the process of filming arose when I went to France, and discovered that the tripod I had been using didn't fit in my suitcase, no matter how many angles I tried to squeeze it in... Looking back though, I feel like the scenes in France have actually benefitted from this, because they look slightly edgier now, and have more of a contrast with the shots at the train station, for which I did use the tripod.