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

We learnt many things about technologies throughout our film making process, mainly special effects such as gun shots, explosions and sound effects.

Below is a video of our director's commentary explaining some issues we had and briefly explaining what technologies we used to overcome them, or were unable to fix. The video is not completely in sync with the commentary. 

Software

We used three main programmes to create our opening sequence:

• Adobe Premier
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Audition

Adobe Premier

Adobe Premier was the main software programme we used to edit, we were quite familiar with using it from GCSE and knew how to use all the simple tools such as the select tool and razor tool, however we became even more experienced through the production of this piece. We got to grips and improved are ability to use effects such as grading and editing of the duration of shots to create slow motion and speed up shots. 

Below is the animatic we created for our film using Adobe Premier:

The animatic was important in the fact it allowed us to:

• See the timings of the shots. 
• Observe if the shot types and length's looked good visually.
• See if the music fitted with the events happening.

Finished Sequence edited using Adobe Premier:

Adobe After Effects
This programme was new to me, we used it for all our special effects such as gun muzzle flashes, blood effects and explosions.

Muzzle Flashes

To create the muzzle flash effects use masks and brightening effects. In the shot shown we had to make a mask layer of Jeremy and the gun, this allows the muzzle flash to be behind him and the gun. The muzzle flash was a image that we obtained searching on google images. As well as the mask, when the gun muzzle flash goes off, we changed the brightness of areas of Jeremy in the frame to create more realism as if the flash has lit up his face.

                                                      

Explosion Effect

To create the explosion effect we used masks again to put the explosion behind the fence. The explosion was a animation effect that we had obtained from a data pack called action essentials. On the day of filming this shot we also threw up stones behind the fence to create the sense of a grenade blast. However only when editing did we realise that the grenade blast would have a larger effect on the surroundings.

 

Blood Effects

The blood effects were also animations in our data pack called action essentials. The process to create blood effects was very similar to muzzle flashes, but where as the muzzle flash only lasted a single frame the blood effect lasted longer. This meant we had to mask the zombie being shot for multiple frames, so the blood effect was positioned behind the zombie's body.





Adobe Audition

We used adobe audition to add in sound recordings such as zombies sounds and extra dialogue. One piece of dialogue we added was when Maran shouts 'Daniel!'. This needed to be added as Jeremy had forgot to say it on the day. We also forgot to get the zombies to make zombie sounds. Below is a scrrenshot of the zombie sounds we created using the Adobe Audition software.