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

When creating out film opening, we have learnt a lot about technology and it could improve our media product. During the process of creating our product we have not only learned how to use different technology but we have improved our knowledge about camera shots and editing.

To make our product we have used a number of different technologies. Below is a list of technologies we made use of for the task;

·         Digital Video Camera and tripod

·         iMovie and Garage Band (Mac)

·         Internet Explorer (YouTube, Blogger)

We have used Panasonic HD camera to film our opening sequence. To make sure all the camera movement and editing in our film opening where affective we had to use a HD camera because if we used video camera with a bad quality then that would disadvantage us as a group because the film opening wouldn’t look as affective. We found Panasonic HD camera successful because we were able to record high quality footage using natural light. However the sound quality was very bad, this is the reason we haven’t used that much of diegetic sound. As our shots required the camera to be stable, we used tripod. This really enhanced our piece as if we have used free hand filming the film opening would look more like a documentary. Overall, using a Panasonic HD camera and tripod really helped and made it easier to film our thriller opening because without both of these technologies our film wouldn’t look as sleek and professional as it does now.

We used iMovie on Mac to do all the editing and special effects for our opening sequence.  This software enabled us to cut/ crop the unneeded scenes. This allowed our film opening to flow smoothly just like a high quality opening film. As me or my partner never had experience with Mac before it was hard at the beginning to use iMovie and cut scenes and edit the sound, however from the help of the teacher and other students at the end of the filming we were able to correctly cut and crop unwanted frames.

Garage Band was programme we used in order to make our soundtrack. Because of the low quality sound of the Panasonic HD camera we had to make most of the sound on Garage Band. This programme offered a wide range of sounds. Garage Band also allowed us to edit how loud we want the sound that we produced to be. This was good affect as this allowed our muscle to be scary and therefore add to the thriller of our opening sequence.  

Next technology that we have used was Internet Explorer (YouTube). This has been used to help me and my partner with some ideas for the opening sequence.  I and my partner used to sit down and watch different opening sequences that are relating to ours, but also we watched film openings like Se7en just to get idea of the editing and camera movements that we could use for the thriller opening.

We have also used Internet Explorer to post all our research, planning and evaluation on blogger. This was for our teachers to be able to give us feedback and for us to improve our work.

 

Work completed by Aleksandra.