Reflecting back on the AS year: Technical Skills learnt

From the beginning of the AS Year and making our thrillers we have developed many different key skills.
These include:

Filmaking:
I remember using the Camera and Tripod for the first time was slightly daunting, seeing as I'd never seen one with so many different buttons before, and the Tripod well clumsiness doesn't work well with a tall object like that and falling down; breaking the camera before I'd even started was my main fear. After getting acquainted with the equipment, it all became very simple to use. With the Camera I learnt how to zoom in and out, frame the specific shots and record our footage remembering to keep it rolling in order to not miss anything important, as the 5 second rule before and after your shot made a real difference and made it alot easier for editing too. As none of us have nerves of steel the tripod was really useful in order for us to keep the camera still to ensure that quality of filming was good, the moveable head was good for tilting (so moving the camera up or down) and to track certain movements ( so left or right)

Final Cut Pro
This software tool was needed for us to edit our footage into a thriller opening sequence. It allowed us to crop our footage, add different sound effects and perhaps backround music, and add different transitions and visual effects to ensure that we were able to achieve our desired result. Which leads us on to...

SoundTrack Pro
This goes hand in hand with Final Cut. I because familiar with this as this software allowed me to create the soundtrack for our thriller, in my group we chose one of the defaulted sounds and repeated it throughout the sequence, however using the cropping tools I managed to edit it so that it sounded like one flowing tune throught so it didn't appear to jump in places. Also I added effects such as distortion to give it an eerie feel, I managed to add different sounds such as footsteps, screams etc.

LiveType
This is the software that we used in order to create the titles and credits for our thriller film, I found this particular software quite tricky and annoying to use. However we managed to make basic titles that worked effectively in our film, we used a basic font and colour but took advantage of the flashing effect that we made with the text.

Handbrake

This funky pineapple allowed us to be able to turn the Final Cut Pro video into the format of an mp4 so that we could upload it into our blogs. Its lame jokes also helped ease the tension of the upcoming deadline as we new this was the last stage :)