Evaluatation question 6

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

By creating our media product I have learnt a lot about certain technologies that I hadn’t tried out previously.

As hardware goes I didn’t lean all that much if I am totally honest. As our title sequence was made out of still photographs and I used my own personal camera to take photos I already new how to use it before we stared the project. Whilst photographing we did have one tripod which did enable us to get more steady shots, but as both myself and George were taking pictures at the same time on separate cameras this meant only one of us could use at a time. However this wasn’t too much of a problem as after looking through the photos and stringing a few together we decide that we preferred the rougher, more jumpy images anyway.

As for filming outside on location I did indeed learn a great many lessons.

• Number one is being ready for anything and everything that nature can throw at you. It is mildly unpleasant to forget your gloves and have to suffer the rest of the day without them, and even more unpleasant if you get soaked and spend the rest of the day drying out.

• Number two is make sure you have all your equipment working properly and that there is enough space on your memory card or tape so that you don’t have to go back to upload photos or fix a two legged tripod.

• Number three is make sure you have enough food on you to keep you going, filming is a tough business and you cant afford to waste time travelling to the shop to buy food.


Not only did I learn a great deal about filming outside, I did also learn a huge amount about editing software. I was pretty much already confident with editing film on I-movie, but editing thousands of photos is a little more challenging. It is easy to edit the images singularly but when you do have so many it can be a little repetitive to edit them all in a small amount of time. In the end after trying out many different programmes such as comic life and various others over a period of three weeks we decided it would be best to edit the photos in Photoshop, but this meant after editing each photo we would have to save every photo, selecting the folder and name each time etc. However after doing some research we discovered that it was possible to set up a list of commands so that the computer could edit and save the photos itself and all we had to do was push ‘ok’. This idea worked as it saved time, but it was very memory hungry so we had to use my hard disk as extra storage space for the edited photos. Despite the discovery of the command tool it still took about two days in total to edit all 1500 photos used in the sequence, but at least we only had to push ‘ok’ and could watch films whilst doing so.

So in hindsight what I have learnt technologically is how unpredictable some things can be. However if you have spare batteries on you, which is another good idea you can save a lot of time. Try to know how you are going to edit your photos before you take them to avoid anger and frustration, plus always be prepared for the unexpected as knowing your luck something will try to blow away what remains of your shooting schedule.