Evaluation Question 6

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

We used a wide variety of technologies in the production of our thriller opening, ranging from the video camera itself, to iMovie and Blogger.

I already had plenty of experience in the technologies that we used to make our thriller opening, so I used the opportunity to improve the skills I already had. I learnt more about how to position the camera for a wider variety of angles and shots, and how to use the tripod effectively to get a stable shot at the preferred angle.

We had to make sure we had followed the 180 degree rule, in our preliminary, there were scenes i worried did break this rule. Because of thriller had many scenes where lighting took an important effect, we had to make sure the lighting was correct, or we would come to find shots were too dark, this included having a lamp out of the shot in the evidence table scenes to add extra light to the shot, so we would be certain that we wouldn’t have any problems with lighting during the editing stages.

We then came to uploading our footage on the iMacs, to do this we had to take the SD card out of the camera and put it in the slot on the Mac, whereas last year we burnt the footage straight from the camera to the Mac using a FireWire. In our preliminary task, we had to use a converter to change the file type of some of the footage to MP4, so I learnt these two skills better. During the editing stages, we used iMovie to make out thriller opening, and we used various tools on iMovie to make our opening the way we wanted, including cropping and trimming footage, adding transitions, effects and filters, for some pieces of footage we changed the playing speed of the clip, and for some we had to reduce or remove the sound.

A scene from our editing stages.

We made numerous copies of our production, and edited these in different ways to find the best ways for our thriller opening to work, after we had found how we liked things to be, we changed our main copy that we had used as a template for the edits to be how we wanted it, using what we had discovered from our number of edits.

We used GarageBand to make a soundtrack for the opening sequence of our film, this consisted of pre-recorded loops that we put together how we wanted them, it also let us make one to be as long as we needed it, and we took various sound effects from GarageBand to include in our opening.

To write our thriller opening production onto a disk we used iDVD. On this we changed the footage that would be played in the “slots” on the title menu, we removed the soundtrack that came pre-installed on the theme we chose, and we changed the font on text that would appear on the title menu.

My blog.

We used Blogger to keep a record of our progress during the course, which I’ve used before, but I made more use of embedding videos which I uploaded to YouTube, and the gadgets feature this time, so I learnt more about how to do this and what you can do with this features.