Construction Post 9: My technical learning curve

My home edit suite (nov 2015)

I have always felt that I have been strong with dealing with technology, given my keen interest in computers and gadgets of all sorts. However, this project has really allowed me to further develop my skills, given the fact that we were able to have so long to work on our piece. For example, in this project I was able to further develop my understanding of the use of keyframes in Premiere Pro and find new ways to utilize this feature. Keyframes essentially allow you to animate any property of any media in your timeline and adjust it over time. For example, you could animate the opacity of a video clip and have it go from 0% to 100% over five seconds and the result would be the video clip fading up from the previous clip over five seconds. We used such a technique to adjust sound levels or hide blemishes in the sound, by animating the audio gain in our audio tracks.

Our Editing Software, Premiere Pro

Another important technical lesson I have learnt during this project is the importance of having a few seconds of "live" time between the moment the director says action and the actors start acting. During our main shoot we did not make such considerations and thus editing clips sometimes became difficult as we had to avoid including the directors call of "action", however by the time we reached the final shoot session, we had learnt from our mistakes and this was no longer an issue for us. Overall, I am very proud of the skills I have learnt from this project and hope they continue to improve in later work.