Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of

constructing this product?

Planning and Research

We based our work on the social application named Blogger, on this website we posted all our coursework made over the duration of the film making recording things such as updates, editing, presentations over conventions etc.

The website I used to create the majority of my presentation was Prezi, which is a panning presentation maker, this made it easier to record all of our progress using conventions, filming processes etc. and embed it onto our blog.

I also used Slideshare to embed Word and PowerPoint documents onto my blog, this also made it easier to record information and quicker and simpler for our coursework.

I used Microsoft PowerPoint and Word to create documents to embed onto my blog using Slideshare, this makes the post easier to read and looks better presented.

YouTube was used to find videos for examples used in our posts for presentations etc. and was also used to upload YouTube videos.

Google was our main search engine used for a range of things during the stages of our work e.g. using Google images to find examples for our work.

Construction

This was the camera we used for filming the scenes in our opening, the name of it is a Panasonic NV-GS500, first using the camera was a little difficult, but after getting used to it using the camera was straightforward and simple and easily able to capture scenes from different angles and depths.

We also used a boom mic in our production to capture important sounds during the filming process or to narrow down the range of sound in order to capture singular sounds instead of a whole range of unwanted ones, at first I found handling the mic quite a handful, but like the camera after a while of handling it, I found it relatively straightforward and easy.

We used a PC from Novatech for the bulk of our coursework such as editing the scenes captured on the camera into our film opening, I found this PC very simple to used as I have had past experiences with PC’s and I also have one myself.

To record our Foley sounds we used a sound booth, this made the quality of our Foley sounds a lot better and more improved than it would if we had recorded them outside of the sound booth, overall the sound booth was easy to use and access.

Further technology

The software we used for editing our scenes into our film, opening was Sony Vegas, at first I found using this software quite difficult, as I did not know how to use it, but because the settings were straightforward, on-going practise with this software made it easy to use over time.

This website was very useful to us for downloading non copyright soundtracks for our film opening, it was particularly useful because this website contained a lot of old music, which had hopes of contains the proper music our film opening needed which was slow jazz music.

This particular piece of software is very difficult to use, and I am still learning all of the controls to use it, we only used this software briefly to fine tune our logo for our film opening, but overall Photoshop is a very technical and pained piece of software to use.

We used an external sound recorder to record our Foley sounds, which include the slamming and sliding of a folder on a table, we found this straightforward to use and it helped better the quality of our film opening.

Sony Vegas

The devices we used within this software includes transitions such as the camera flash and fades in and out.We used these devices to create more realistic scenes e.g. we used the camera flash in order to make the scene look like it was taken from the coroner’s point of view.We used fades in and out to yet again increase realism and to show the passing of time.

Lighting, Sound and Editing

Editing:

The tools we used within Sony Vegas were editing tools such as the transformation into black and white film, this was used to increase the realism of our film to make it look like it had been produced in the 40-50’s, we also used the camera flash edit to make some scenes look like they are taken from a coroner’s perspective, after the first couple of weeks of using this software, using these tools became easy and straightforward.

Lightning:

The majority of lighting used within our film opening was natural lighting, as a lot of the scenes took place outside, but some scenes, such as the train station scene, had artificial lighting, that was high key, i.e. the streetlamp, other scenes such as the interrogation scenes contained low key overhead lighting as it was filmed in a drama studio, getting the lighting right when we used artificial lighting was not easy because the alterations had to be very small or else the murderer’s identity would have been revealed, although we managed to get it right in the end.

Sound:

We didn’t use a great deal of sound within our film opening, as it was all mostly the narrator reading from a script, the sound we did use was Foley sounds, which were recorded separately using an external recorder and mic, this was simple to do and did not take much effort.

EvaluationOverall, websites such as Blogger, Freeplaymusic.com, SlideShare, YouTube and Prezi were simple, but very useful to use they both helped us greatly throughout the course.Technology such as cameras, boom mics, the computers, sound booths and recorders were all very helpful, some such as the cameras and boom mics were difficult to handle at the start, but practise makes perfect, others such as the computers were easy to use because of past experience.Software such as Sony Vegas was difficult to use at first because I had no experience in film editing, others such as Photoshop were very difficult to use because there were lots of technical controls and settings and I am still learning on how to use the tool.Overall I think the processes were very fun and took a lot of time and hard work to complete.