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

There are of course a number of things that I believe I have learnt during my time constructing this product, Firstly I would like to talk about what you can't see in the final piece before moving on.

Firstly, I have began to use a number of different media outlets as well as having planned to use certain ones in my evaluation. One of these particular outlets was of course Podbean, Podbean allows its users to create their own podcasts with ease as well as having a free reasonable 50MB of storage which was useful. On the other hand, I have also been given the opportunity to use Prezi Presentation software after it was recommended to me by my partner, and whose use in our Product Presentation was indeed useful.


Moving onto to technology that directly affected the content of the film, I have been utilizing the Full Adobe CS6 package frequently in order to achieve a number of interesting effects and fixes in our piece. Most prominently featured in our piece is the Film Dissolve effect between cuts, which fades the scene from the darkest parts first, then the lightest, giving it a very 'Cinematic' effect. The original piece we constructed had a number of shaky camera shots, but you'll notice that in fact the shots are actually rather smooth, this is because we utilized Premiere Pro's Warp Stabilizer tool in order to blend frames in a way that gives a much smoother movement instead of a shaky appearance which looks awfully amateur.

In terms of Hardware and tools we had a number of special items at our disposal, The most obvious being tripods but we also extended our scene's stylized look with some additional tools. One tool Being our Opteka X-Grip Portable Stabilizer which helped to reduce the shakiness before we finished the touch up with the Warp Stabilizer tool. Another key player in our film equipment was our use of a 160 Bulb Stage Lighting piece, It allowed us to brighten up key areas that were just too dark or unsuitable to work with, The Opteka stand also had a built in tool to allow it be attached. We accompanied the light with an orange filter to match the lighting coming from the orange drapes in the room. Finally, we have our final piece, I had managed to get a hold of a Blue Snowball Desk Microphone in order to do the voice over for the end scene, the clearer sound quality makes it more understandable and without it, we would have had to use a much lesser graded mic.

video001 from David Smith on Vimeo.

In general, I have learnt a great deal about technologies, I believe that they can be used to both enhance a piece but also stylize it properly, How you use technology can be a real saving grace at points and while I may be sad to see Analogue equipment being used less and less I can still really get behind the new technology of today, In the future I hope to use a number of different pieces of tech that interest me including green screen effects and possibly even tracks for moving shots.

False Impressions Equipment from David Smith on Vimeo.