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

constructing this product?

By Imogen and Annabelle.

Technology used.

During the course , we have learned to use a lot of different technologies. Most of which we had not used before, they all have helped us hugely to improve our work. Here is some examples of the main technologies that we have used:

Wordpress and Slideshare.

Before this course, we had never used the Wordpress (www.wordpress.com) website, but it soon became vital to us. This webpage was used to set up our own personal blogs that allowed us to electronically track our progress, upload key documents and demonstrate our progression. Wordpress was also extremely important in communicating all of our coursework to the examiner and Mr Scargill (our media teacher). We learnt the basics through tutorials and then furthered our knowledge through practicing.

Similarly to the Wordpress site, neither of us had ever used Slideshare (www.slideshare.net) before. This clever website allowed us to upload PowerPoint's and embed them on to our blogs, this helped to make them as multi-media as possible and demonstrate a variety of different skills.

Apple Macbook.

We used an apple macbook for a lot of different purposes throughout this course. Both of us used to have Microsoft window laptops, so this meant teaching ourselves how to use the unique apple layout. Thankfully, we are both quick learners and we soon got used to the differences but we definitely had to adjust!

iMovie and iDVD.

We used a brilliant piece of software called iMovie to edit all of our footage together and to try to make it look as flowing and coherent as possible. This software helped us to make our movie more precise and have a more professional feel. It has a number of different uses but these are the main ones that we used it for:

Editing Clips together, Cropping or rotating shots, Adjusting the lighting, Changing the sound, Adding titles, Altering the speed of our clips.

iDVD is a software that’s available on the apple MacBook’s. It is very useful when burning events to disc and it made our product look a lot more professional by allowing us to choose a menu structure to show at the very start of our movie This taught us that it is possible for media students, like ourselves, to create a professional looking movie. We learnt about this through other media students and teachers but we also found out a lot for ourselves through trial and error.

YouTube and Social Networking Sites.

Youtube played a big part in our media coursework. It allowed us to research into our genre by looking at other similar movie openings online. It also allowed us to share our movies, then embed them into our own blogs in order to show our teacher and the examiner our work. Although we had both used YouTube before, we still learnt a lot of new skills, for example, we had never uploaded videos before so that was a new experience.

Again, we had both used Facebook before, but for completely different purposes. Throughout this course, we have learnt that Facebook is a great place to research and get feedback from people who could be potential clients. It allowed us find out opinions from a variety of randomly selected people. Twitter is very similar to Facebook in the way that it allowed us to communicate with our target audience to find out their views. They are also both great ways to advertise your product and make people aware of it.

Music Downloads.

We used both freeplaymusic.com and soundjay.com to get a variety of both sound effects and music for ‘The Unknown’. Both of these websites allow you to download MP3’s for free as they are un-copyrighted. For a low budget film company, this was very helpful. We learned about how to find sound effects, how to download them onto our laptop and then add them into iMovie to accompany film footage.

Camera.

Despite having a few issues with our borrowed camera, it helped us hugely and we could not have produced our movie opening without it. We learnt how to operate the different school camera’s and transfer the footage to the Mac’s. The camera that we used to make ‘The Unknown’ was not as high quality as we would have liked but we have still learnt how to do a lot of different things with the camera, for example, we discovered that is it vital to use a tripod to prevent wobbly un-professional shots.

Conclusion.

Technology has had a big part in our learning over the past year and we have learnt so much about how to use it approprately and efficiently. Not only have we been introduced to new technologies (for example, Wordpress), we have also widened our skills in those that we already used (for example YouTube). We can confidently say that we can use all of the technologies listed above and that we have learnt how to do so through taking advice from others and mainly, a lot of practice. We have thoroughly enjoyed learning how to use these technologies and widening our abilities to improve our knowledge. We are very much looking forward to furthering our learning and building on the skills we have discovered this year.