Q6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

When constructing this media product I used a variety of different technologies such as editing software, cameras and camera equipment, and the use of different media software’s to create an effective opening. 

I used blogger to post my information for the AS Media task. Blogger is a simple blogging website which helped me to organise and display my research in a variety of different forms, i.e. pictures, videos, text and audio files. Blogger also came in handy when came to planning as it meant all of our content was in one area which meant it was simple to go back and look at all of our work in dated order.

YouTube came in handy when researching thrillers and the genre itself. By being able to use YouTube we could view other peoples thriller openings; amature and professional, to get a real sense of what was needed of us. Furthermore not only YouTube, but search engines such as Google massively helped us when it came to gaining more research such as looking up age restrictions by the BBFC etc.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter helped to promote our thriller opening and spread the word of it; it also helped to gain feedback from our target audience whom told us what worked well and what can be approved upon.

When it came to filming the footage for our thriller opening we used a Cannon 550D DSLR HD camera, by using a high definition camera it meant that we could get better quality camera shots to our opening by adding that extra detail with little things such as manually focusing onto things for atmospheric shots and also getting brilliantly detailed close up shots.

 

We used an Apple Mac along with the software IMoive to edit our footage and create the product. Through the process I have learnt many editing skills and they have been refined with the duration of the task. I have improved with cutting clips precisely so they’re sharp, smooth and have good continuity. I learnt how use some of the effects in the imovie package suchas the ‘ken burns effect’. We used the ken burns effect when shooting the footage of the pictures and newspaper clippings on the wall, this meant using another skill of taking stills from our footage and then using the ken burns effect to pan into a particular part of the still. With my media partner we both also became more knowledgeable in our choices of transitions between clips of our thriller opening (such as using a fade to white for a flashback). We made sure that they were suitable not only for the opening in general but also for where they would be appearing, so there wasn’t too many or too little.

 

I also have learnt how to make a piece of music loop through and match the scenes being played, so that the tension in the track, is building at the same time as the tension in the thriller itself. Although I also used AVS Audio Editor to help enhance the track and reverse it in parts so that the track sounded more eerie.

 

We had to deal with some problems when it came to our editing though, some of the shots we had taken were supposed to be in the dark and when looking at them through the camera they seemed to look great. Although, when we later uploaded our footage onto the Mac, the quality of the shots had been taken away, and left them looking grainy. We tried to edit the contrast, brightness, hue and saturation of our footage using the different options on imovie, but unfortunately it still didn’t look as quality as our other shots. With no time to re-film we decided to keep to the original quite grainy footage and hope with it being a short scene, it wouldn’t stick out too much ‘like a sore thumb’. This could have been resolved at the setting filming in the light and editing it darker.

 

We have learnt from this that in the future, we ought to film in the light and edit them darker on the Macs, rather than the opposite way around like myself and Dan did do. Finally, once we had finished the editing we learnt how to process the film, add finishing touches such as a DVD menu and burn to a disk using iDVD.