Question 6What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing this product?

Planning and construction

Technologies I learnt –

Blogger to post the stages of planning and research

YouTube to upload TA interview and evaluations.

Prezi

Slide Share

Film Stat Websites (IMDB, Box Office Mojo, and The Numbers)

Using Blogger and a blogging website in general was relatively new to me and had very little experience in using it. At first using Blogger was not too hard but there were a couple of things I had to get used to doing such as assigning the date of the post I was posting in order to keep my blog in order. I also had to get used to using embed codes when posting things I made through Prezi or Slideshare. After a while I had become familiar with these tasks and using blogger was overall very simple to use. Blogger was quite a good way to blog my media work as the posting is quite easy once you understand the HTML parts of posting.

I used YouTube to post my TA interview. At first I could not do this as the school network seemed to not allow this even when trying to upload directly from Movie Studio. To solve this I took the video file home and uploaded the video on my home PC. This took a good amount of time as the internet in our area isn’t very fast.

During my planning and research I used Prezi a number of times. Prezi was quite easy to use and come to grasps with creating a presentation due to its simple to use user interface and easy ways to insert videos and photos. I did have trouble with the presentation saving at first but I solved this by checking it had saved before I closed the page the presentation was on.

I also used Slideshare to upload my PowerPoint presentations and work I did on a Word document in order to be able to post them on my blog. I was unable to upload my files on Slideshare while at school as the network did not allow me to. I overcame this problem by having my teacher upload the files and send me the embed code and after a while just uploaded the files from my home PC. Other than that, using slideshare to post files to my Blogger account was fairly easy as all I needed once it was uploaded was the embed code.

Finally I used a number of websites to gain information on film statistics. I used IMDB, Box Office Mojo, and The Numbers to gain this information. Using IMDB was easy as the presentation of the information is simple due to the small amount of text and the fact they use pictures, making it easy to recognise the films. Box Office Mojo and The Numbers were a little more difficult as the information was presented in tables and text, making it harder to find a specific piece of information. I overcame this by slowly going through each table to find the piece of information I needed which was tedious but I finally got the information I needed to complete my work.

Planning and construction

Construction

Technologies I learnt –

Camera

Sony Vegas 13 and Movie Studio Platinum

Audio recorder and external mic

Royalty free music websites

Construction During the filming of our film opening we used a Nikon D5000 for the just video. Using this camera was

fairly easy as it is my camera and have obviously used it a number of times for both my Photography coursework and other filming. However it is not the best possible filming camera so we were limited in the overall quality of the video. I think using my own camera rather than the ones provided by the media department was the right choice as my familiarity with the camera made the filming and the preparation for it was a lot smoother which allowed us to focus more on the people acting in the film opening and the overall look of the shots which I think benefited the final product.

We did not use any artificial light in our film opening as it would have been difficult to move and provide electricity to the lights to our outside location. Instead we chose to film during mid-day in order to gain a good amount of light. This was beneficial for us as we wanted quite high key natural lighting in order to establish our Killer character even further.

The editing software I used to edit the film opening was fairly easy and simple to use as I have used them a number of times for other editing I have done. I was more familiar with Sony Vegas 13 as that is the software I have on my home PC. Movie Studio Platinum was relatively just as easy to use as they are essentially the exact same thing but sometimes ran slower as they were on the school PCs. The rendering on the school PCs took quite a long time to do so I decided to render at home to save time.

We recorded sound separately from our video recording as the mics on the camera are only mono sound and made it hard to have different levels of sound for background sound and the sound effects. We used a sound recorder with an external mic plugged in to record the foley sound of the dragging, and footsteps. Doing this allowed me to chose which sounds best suited what was happening in the video as well as deciding the level each sounds were at to give the final product more depth in terms of sound. Using these were not particularly difficult to use as I have used things similar before and have done research into sound recording before. It was hard to get the right sounds at first but we just kept trying and the sound we recorded eventually fit with the video and sounded realistic.

We used a couple royalty free music websites for the music in our film opening. We used Epidemicsound and Incompetech for thr music. These websites were fairly easy to use and download audio files from after making accounts and filling in a few boxes. However it did take us a long time to find the songs we wanted for our film opening as we needed songs that would set a specific tone which was not made easier by both websites having quite useless search filtering methods. We solved this by just putting the time in to search for the right music that would suit our film opening best.

Editing

Here I edited the video together, making sure it lined up correctly with the previous clips. We only concentrated on the video at this point so we could decide what sound effects and music would best fit the video.

I then edited the sound that we recorded and made sure it was synced with the video to make sure it was believable as possible. We chose to record sound separately so we could concentrate on each thing individually.I then used the media

generated text for our title and then placed it on top of video of TV static I had downloaded as it created a Thriller kind of feeling.

I finally used our studio logo that we created on Photoshop and also placed that on top of the same TV static. I did this for the same reason as the titles.

Evaluation

For my evaluation stage of my work I used a lot of the same software I used

in the previous two stages.

Technologies –

Blogger

Prezi

Audio recorder

Sony Vegas 13

Slideshare

YouTube

Microsoft office

Evaluation

I used blogger to upload all of my evaluation questions. This was very easy due to having used it throughout all of my previous work.

Prezi was also easy to use as I had used it a number of times before in my previous work.

For my evaluation question five I wrote a script that I then read out and recorded with my headset mic at home, using the windows sound recorder as this was just basic sound recording. While recording I found it difficult to read the script out as I am used to speaking quite quickly, making me say the wrong words. This meant I had to try and read each part of the script out over and over again until I was able to get it right. I then cut out the times I said the wrong thing in the audio file and edited video and pictures to go with what I said. I used Sony Vegas for this which was easy due to using it previously. I then used YouTube to upload the video at home as the school network didn’t let it which again was easy but still took some time due to the internet speed.

I used Microsoft office Word and Powerpoint multiple times to answer my evaluation questions. Using these were especially easy as I have used them to do my school work and other things for many years.