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

By Timothy Oziegbe

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

This is the camera that I used which is a Canon Legria FS200 which I acquired from the school because I felt that this camera offered good enough quality for me to capture my footage on. The camera also suited me because it had a variety of different uses, it has 41x zoom which was perfect for getting shots which I couldn’t have done with out a good zoom on. It also can record movies and photos, and there's a dual-shot option that lets you switch between capturing stills and video without changing modes, although you can't capture stills while it's actively recording video. The camera was not only good hardware wise it was perfect for hand held footage with the strap at the side, a flip out screen and the design was nice and compact allowing me to film comfortable so I could retain steady freehand shots.

The tripod that I borrowed from school was absolutely excellent in retaining steady shots especially if the shot was a prolonged one and not a short one. The adjustable legs length and width wise and the tightening and loosening head helped me film from different heights and different angles which made my film a lot more professional as the tripod enabled me to use a more varied selection of shots for my opening. Without this tripod the film would have been a lot more shaking and would have looked amateur detracting from the opening, for my film this tripod was essential.

I decided that time spend not editing is time wasted, so I took it upon my own hands to make sure that I managed to edit in my spare time and because I didn’t have mac I decided to use CS6 because it supports final cut pro also. This is a professional product which offers a variety of side products to make your product look brilliant.

Daily motion is a brilliant website to use for uploading movies. I used this to upload my preliminary task and to upload a recording for my evaluation, the website is straightforward to use a provides a service free of charge to embed your videos into your blog easily. It’s also perfect for me to use because our school system doesn’t allow YouTube so this was a way to get around that and still have videos accessible to view on my blog.

Blogger was by far the most important online tool for me to present my coursework. This website is completely free and acts as an online diary, this simple layout means that anybody can use it and you can create your own area and have your blog accessible to as many people as you like. It will let you import YouTube movies, your own movies, pictures and much more the program is extremely versatile. Using blogger helped me keep up to date with my blogging as it tells you when you posted on it and if anybody has commented i.e. my media teacher if I needed some assistance in a certain area that I wasn’t quite up to scratch in.

Mr Henton introduced us to this website a while ago and it’s extremely useful. It provides a great service allowing people to watch the openings to many films for free, many of the films on there are very popular. It gives you the ability to study different professional films, this helped me because I was able to take a few idea and manipulate them into my own idea just from spending some time watching them on this website.

YouTube is an excellent website to use, you can upload videos and you can watch them on there too. I used this website regularly to check different openings and tips of how to get the best footage and tips on editing all from the comfort of my own home. They also have a feedback button where you can see that you need to improve your video and they also have comments enabled so you can actually read specific comments about your movie. The only problem with this website is that it’s blocked inside school so I used this strictly outside of school times.

There is a website called VodPod which is similar to YouTube but I don’t think it’s as good. The layout isn’t as professional and it isn’t as recognized although for small movies which I will be doing it doesn’t matte to a great deal, it’s another free site you can use to upload movies and receive comments on them.

Final cut is the software program which I predominately used to edit my opening horror on. This software isn’t available free but with the prices comes an excellent editing software. The program is extremely professional, it not only offers a variety of ways to edit, use transitions, use video filters etc. but the layout is also very easy to understand which was a help when learning how to use it for the first time. I was glad to be using this software because I have seen some films edited on there and they are of superb quality and some of the top editors won’t use anything other than this software.

There was many complications with adding audio into our movie because sound is a very important part of a horror movie and without it the movie wouldn’t have such an impact, so for this reason I chose to use freesound. The website offers thousands of free sounds ranging from eating noises to animals getting slaughtered. The sounds I wanted I was able to get from freesound very easily. The most important thing about this website it that all of the music uploaded to it isn’t copyrighted which is what was causing the problem and this was a brilliant solution around it.

Slideshare is a very useful program to use because you cant put a presentation straight onto your blog you need a third party software and this is by far the best one. It’s free to set up, it’s quick and it’s user-friendly. I have done a few slideshows which I have used slideshare for.

FL studio is a brilliant program to use if you want to create your own music. This program would be very useful because we can’t use copyright music in our opening and creating your own means you can chose exactly what sound you want in your film. This software doesn’t come free there is a fee you have to pay but you can download the trial to see if works for you. The only downside is that we don’t have this at school so it would be only after school at home where it could be used.