film opening technology standard;

The video camera used in my production was a Sony Cybershot point-and-shoot digital camera. This belongs to me and so it was very easy for me to use. The burst function on the camera was most useful for taking my photos, although even with the tripod I still felt I needed more hands to use everything at the same time and get better shots. I used a Gorillapod tripod, which is miniature and very flexible - very handy for stop motion.

While composing my shots I tried to use markers so when changing around my props I didn't move things too much, particularly with the more fiddly scenes. This seemed to work okay, but I guess I should have just used more blutack.

I recorded the dialogue on my camera as I didn't have immediate access to a separate microphone. The quality was not as good as it could have been if I had taken the time to organise this different method.
I gave up importing my images and sound almost right away on the school computers as I had a lot of problems with Premiere Pro, and in the end I decided it was best to do all my editing at home. The importing of my files - especially music/sound files went a whole lot smoother at home.

The song I used came from my large music collection, I spent a lot of time deciding what song to use, narrowing it down to a few choices and finally picking Hedonistic Me - Born Ruffians. I picked this song as it was just the right speed, and the guitar theme was perfect for what was happening in the storyline with the owl playing guitar. Sounds effects were slightly more difficult to find because of the new downloading law but after a wee bit of sleuthing I did find some really good free sound database sites and sourced my sounds from there.

My two major editing programs used were Microsoft Digital Image and Sony Vegas Movie Studio. Microsoft Digital Image played a massive role as nearly all my stills were manipulated in some way so I could fit them together and have them look as I wanted. Removing white backgrounds from all my pictures and making them transparent was a slow and gruelling process but at least it was something I was confident I could do and was previously aware of how long the process would be, having edited images countless times before. Each shot is usually made up of two still cut and edited together. I had never used a professional movie editing program properly before but after deciding on Sony Vegas I quickly picked up how it worked. I found the editing program easy to use and it was preferable to programs such as Windows Movie Maker as it had lots of great tools like the marker function which was absolutely perfect for aligning my music and sounds with the pictures - I believe this really made my film a polished product. I also used Audacity to make the dialogue recording clearer by removing the background noise. Audacity was also used to chop and change my music, cutting out a section in the middle so when playing from start to finish the ending was still included and the song sounded completed.