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

Technology and equipment which we used to create our film opening sequence:

• Pre-production - the internet (research, draw inspiration from real media products, social networking used to create group chats for planning meetings etc.), Sony DSC H50 (to make our animatic sequence)
• Production - Canon Legria HV30 Mini DV (used to film footage and record sound on set), three-point lighting system (to light the shoot), tripod (to steady stationary shots) 
• Post-production - Adobe Premiere Pro (to edit our sequence)

Pros and cons of the technology and equipment which we used:

1. The internet - free, easily accessible, quick and easy to use, wifi connection sometimes slow
2. Sony DSC H50 - handheld and light which made it easy to use, autofocus made the shooting process easier, the battery life was not very long
3. Canon Legria HV30 Mini DV - also handheld and light, good quality, viewfinder made it easy to view footage, autofocus made the shoot easier, recorded on tape so it took a long time to transfer our footage onto a computer
4. Three-point lighting system - created a natural lighting effect, fairly easy to set up, the lights became very hot after a while so we had to handle them with a lot of care
5. Tripod - light so made it easy to transport, easily adjustable, it sometimes got in the way during the shoot
6. Adobe Premiere Pro - lots of different aspects made it easy to edit specific parts of our sequence e.g. we were able to adjust the volume of the sounds within our sequence, we were able to grade each individual shot etc., rendering slowed the editing process

If we were to do the shoot again I would...
...make sure that we charged both camera batteries to save time-wasting
...watch back footage on the viewfinder to ensure we had several successful shots to choose from when editing our sequence
...switch of the lights more often to prevent the shoot becoming very hot
...wear the gloves at ALL times when operating the lights as they get extremely hot
...save every few minutes when using Adobe Premiere Pro to prevent losing any work
...render at the end of each editing session rather than during editing to save time

Skills which I have learnt

• Grading

We used Adobe Premiere Pro to grade our shots. Within this program, we used the three-way color corrector to adjust the colouring of each shot. At first it was difficult to know what tones worked well in which shot but after a while I got the hang of it and I really enjoyed the grading process. 

As well as three-way colour corrector, we also used procamp to adjust the brightness, contrast and saturation of each individual shot. I had a similar experience using this tool as I did when using the three-way color corrector tool as, at first, I found it difficult to use however after a while I was able to use it effectively.

Here are some examples of ungraded and graded shots:

• How to use LiveType and Adobe After Effects

As a group, we had no experience in using both LiveType and Adobe After Effects prior to this task. Therefore creating titles on these programs was a very daunting challenge however we managed to use both programs to our advantage and we created some very successful titles using these programs.

We used Adobe After Effects to create the interactive 'Matt Romo' title at the beginning of our sequence:

We used LiveType to create the 'Consequences' title at the end of our film opening:

In addition to all of the technologies which we used in the pre-production, production and post-production of our film opening, we used Facebook throughout to communicate with each other:

This proved to be extremely successful as Facebook is a quick method of contacting people. We created a group chat which saved us asking each individual group member if we had a question about the task.