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

Apple Final Cut and Adobe After Effects

I learnt that once the basics of final cut are learnt, it can create very effective scenes, however problems were posed e.g. …

- When using the echo effect in the scenes where the pictures were getting ripped down, I found that if the clips were played at ordinary pace the effect looked terrible because everything was multiplied too much and moved too slowly i.e. Beth looked like she had ten hands! This would make the viewer a bit dizzy and the scenes would not be effective at all.  The fact that each picture was snatched about ten times would have also gotten tedious.  But, when I sped up the scenes to almost triple the speed (from 100 to 280) the multiplying effect of it blended together so there was not as many hands and it created the effect that I was looking for - of insanity.  It also created more of a realistic point of view shot, for example if you wave your hand you will see several hands rapidly moving which merge together to create a fluid movement.  This is what happened when I sped up the shots.

- When editing the font there were long lists of transitions that I was taking too long to get through, and customising some of them was hard at times.  It was difficult finding out if I was able to make a path for the letters so they would be in a shape, but I could not find out information on the internet on how to do it on After Effects.  I wanted each letter of the title to get slightly taller to resemble the shape of an open door, so using a shape similar to a parallelogram would have made this easier.  This can be done on Microsoft Publisher, but apparently I would not have been able to copy this into the software.  In the end, I changed my idea to just using a transition for the title that would look cool.

- We also had problems with rendering as we did not know how to render it for a while, so we had to export the whole project each time and re-open it.  This wasted a lot of time.