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

We used different technologies and different pieces of equipment to make our final media product, some of these that we used are:

• A camera (Canon MD255) and a DV tape to film the footage for our final product.
• A tripod (Jessops TP327) to keep the camera steady and help us in shots such as pan, tilt and high/low angle shots.
• A microphone to record the small amount of sound and block out any background noise so we could clearly hear the dialogue.
• Adobe Premiere Element 7.0 – Part of the Adobe CS4 package. We used this to edit the clips together, cut out unnecessary footage, add sound/sound effects, and complete our final film.
• Windows Movie Maker was used to help create the Pursuer title, to enable it to flash up letter by letter.
• Paint and Microsoft Office Picture Manager was used for editing and pasting pictures together.
• Free Play Music (www.freeplaymusic.com) is where we found the music for Pursuer; we used this as it is non-copyright and worked very well with our final edited film.
• We used YouTube (www.youtube.com) for inspiration and to get an idea of what other films were out there and to help give us an idea of our target audience, our Pathé clip was also found here. We were allowed to use this in out film as it is such a short clip and it does not break the Copyright Protection act.
• Blogger (www.blogger.com) was used as our main area whereby we could upload our research and planning, videos, trailers evaluations and anything else related to our AS Media Studies course.

When using the camera we found it hard to get the right angles but after a few attempts of filming each scene we managed to find a suitable angle. Also we had to experiment using the tripod to get the right angle. When we used the microphone we plugged it into the camera we only used this to block out the background noise when filming the scene insde the house.

From making our opening sequence, I have realised how difficult it is to use a piece of software such as Adobe. We only started using this software in November. And since then, we have progressed very well for example at first we did not know how to cut, edit or add transition, effects and titles in and after learning the basics of Adobe Premiere Elements we became more able to add these features in and use the software correctly in order to create a good opening sequence. The quality of the footage/film we have had problems with, we had to save each file in a different format and try and upload it to YouTube however when doing this it proved to be extremely unsuccessful as it kept degrading the quality of our footage/film. Finally we found a good format to save it as (MPEG) and it uploaded successfully and at a good level of quality. Overall we have learnt about different technologies and different pieces of equipment to make Pursuer.