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

During the production of our film opening The Steps, we found that Slideshare was not sufficient to keep copies of our work as we went along as it took too long to upload videos. Also, it was more efficient if we could have the same place that we’d all upload to – Photobucket was the option we settled upon. There we could upload newly edited clips, original footage from both cameras as well as the stills from the shoot.

We used the program iMovie HD for editing, as it was more convenient to the software of the Mac computers we were using and it had a wide variety of different editing effects; also it was much simpler and easier for beginners like us to use, which saved time as we were working to our coursework deadlines and may not have had time to spend figuring out how to use a more complex program e.g. Final Cut Pro.

The steps titling

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New line cinema

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Adobe Photobucket CS5 was used to edit the colouring of the New Line Cinema introduction, and then Adobe ImageReady to save it as a QuickTime movie that could be imported straight into iMovie HD after discovering that gifs wouldn’t work in that program. (This is explained further in other tutorial presentations). The same two programs were used, Photoshop to create the titles The Steps along with its effect and ImageReady so it could be saved as a QuickTime Movie.

Our film used media products of two different kinds of camera: we filmed part of our footage on tape, on a MiniDV 250 camera. The other half of our footage was filmed on another, digital camcorder (SANYO Xacti 12MP Waterproof Digital Camcorder). This second camera helped contrast the two different styles of film as they were cut between in editing constantly. The second camera looked a little off key, seeing Kelly the soon to be victim from a Dutch angle – the camerawork was amateurish and very shaky, heightening the realism of the character Krissy filming them all like in a video diary and the ominous blue offsetting a dark tone, overall contrasting it highly to the better quality footage from the tape. This challenges the conventional use of one type of camera for filming, developing it so as to use both types of camera’s qualities as strengths and playing up against each other.