THE USE OF TECHNOLOGY...

By Dan Chapman, Geoff Chan, Paul Neville & Toby Morrison

The Technology We Used

In order to create our final product, many forms of technology were used in order to bring things together and aid us in the completion of our groups work. The products which we used were:

Final Cut Express & Live Type

Sony DCR-HC37 Camera & MTrack Voice Recorder

iPod/Music Phone & Bluetooth

USB, Apple Desktop/Laptops

Alternative Technologies

Without the use of the technological products mentioned, some of our tasks would have indeed been slower to complete, and potentially be increasingly difficult or impossible to complete. Alternative products we could have used include:

Video Phone & Tape Recorder

Floppy Disk & Infra-red

Alternative Brand of Computers/Laptops

Final Cut Express

Final Cut Express was the main program which we used in order to produce our final movie. Through the use of FCP, we learnt and developed certain skills which will aid us in future projects which require the use of film making. Skills that we learnt include the following:

How to use special effects such as a Cross-Dissolve

How to add in scrolling text and banners

Improve confidence with general editing

How to include ‘Connection Interrupted’ effects

Without FCP, alternative software that we could have used include Premier Pro, and Movie Maker.

Live TypeLive type was the software which we used in order to create our opening sequence which included our group name ‘REC Productions’ and a flickering picture which we found took from the movie ‘REC’. We felt that this add a dark and scary effect to our sequence.

In order to produce the actual title ‘REC Productions’ in Live Type, we used the effects ‘Timer’, ‘Frigid’ & ‘Shake’.

Timer was used in order to have a count down through various letters before reaching ‘REC’ and once ‘REC’ was reached, ‘Frigid’ was used in order to make it look like the letters have been frozen in place. The effect ‘Shake’ was used on the picture in order to give it the moving flickering effect which as mentioned, we felt came across as particularly effective and relevant to our movie’s genre.

Sony DCR-HC37 Camera

Throughout production of our movie we used the brand of camera mentioned above. This proved to be a very reliable make of camera which was able to zoom in/out , rewind and playback; it also recorded sound.

An alternative to using this camera would be to obviously use another brand of camera or potentially use a phone camera.

During the production of our movie, we used the zoom in and zoom out on the camera. This was used in the news presentation part of our movie when Mac the Camera Man takes the camera off of the tripod in order to film the new people on screen with brief hand held camera.

MTrack Voice Recorder

The MTrack Voice Recorder was used in order to record Paul (Professor Paul Metcalf) puking up his guts on the laboratory floor.

The sound which was recorded on the Sony Camera was corrupted by an unnamed source and the scenes sound was thus re-recorded on the voice recorder.

If we didn’t have the voice recorder, we could have quite easily achieved the same effect by re-recording it on the Sony Camera or by using a modern phones voice recorder if it had the software on it.

USBs & Phones

In order to transfer our work from the iMacs to alternate

Devices such as the Macbook laptop and our computers

At home we used USBs and Bluetooth.

Quite simply, the USBs were used in order to transfer

Our work from one place to another. Bluetooth was used

For the same purpose but it was done by sending pictures

From our phones directly to the PC or Laptop we were

Working on at the time.

Without the use of USBs or Bluetooth, we would have

Had to find another way in which we could transfer data

From one place to another. The easiest way to do this

Would have been via e-mail.

Summing Up

The technologies we used were a big contribution to the completion of our project. Without such technologies, our project would have taken longer and the quality of the effects would not have had such an impact as they currently do.

Programs such as Final Cut Express and live Type were particularly helpful in the production of task.