Evaluation Q.6

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

In my opinion I already had substantial knowledge of technology as I carried out the GCSE media course however I feel like my knowledge has been put to the test and I have constantly been learning through the whole process of filming and editing. Blogger.com was a new technology to me as I had never used anything like this before and at first it was hard to understand where all the features were such as how to upload a video or how to change the background of the blog but it became second nature after a while. I have found that a blog has been very important and it’s a creative way to document the whole process of making my final product. I have learnt that the technology is quite simple but I must be careful with certain grammar and spellings as blogger doesn't automatically correct this, also when embedding videos, prezi’s and slide-shares I had to do some independent research and watch some tutorials on how to do this as at first I was unsure.

Changing Blog background/format

   

For my editing and filming, I did the filming on an I pad mini as it was the best type of technology we could find even if it wasn’t a high crisp finish. We used an iPad mini to film our opening sequence to a horror film. This was an important piece of technology in constructing our product as without the high quality camera we wo
uldn’t have been able to film the narrative in a low key lighting. We had to make sure that the camera screen was locked on a horizontal level as otherwise the screen would flip and the clips would have black borders when we moved them around to put them together when editing. Normally we would have used a tripod to make the camera still and therefore clear filming however we wanted the scene to look like it was through the eyes of the antagonist therefore when I filmed I carried the iPad in my hands to make the audience feel like they were seeing exactly what the antagonist was seeing. We used an Apple Mac computer to edit as this had a technology called Final Cut Pro and this was essential to the putting together of all of our clips to create a professional smooth running opening scene.

I learnt a lot about final cut pro as I had never fully explored features such as adding effects and transitions and this is one of the main aspects that made our final product look professional as a whole. The pre-lim task gave me some ideas of how I could expand on just using the basics of the software so when it came to producing the final product I experimented a lot to find the most suitable and usable aspects of the software for our opening scene: some of these being Ken Burns, transitions and light changes. As i carried out four editing sessions with my group I became more and more familiar with the technology as I went along and felt like I learnt more every day.

 There are a few technologies that weren't as important to the overall product but without them we wouldn't have been able to make the product to a high standard. For example YouTube was used for collecting ideas and finding the overall background soundtrack, sound bible to download some individual sounds and font space to look at different styles of font that would fit the name of my opening sequence.