Question 6 - What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

  

   We have learned about technologies throughout the entire construction of the opening sequence to our film; from the hours spent doing research to production, through to the post-production.
The overall process was a new experience in terms of the new technologies we used. Throughout the making of our opening sequence, the equipment used required different skills and process. The process of constructing this media product consisted of different elements such as the blogging aspects as well as the research conducted and finally the final filming part to it.

  

    One of the primary experiences was the blogging side to this task, due to the fact that we had not encountered constructing coursework and research in this form before. Therefore, the skills developed in this were presentational as well as practical in terms of how to present and show that we can use media skills to represent our research. Blogging was a huge part towards our research and planning, as we instantly had to post our findings on to the blog in order for it to be marked.

 

   

The use of the Internet has shown us how to collect appropriate information necessary to include in our product. During the research and planning stages before making the product, we learned a lot about what the internet had to offer. The internet offered a vast amount of information on past and present thriller films, clips of films going all the way back to the 1960's, which would not have been easily accessible with a lack of the Internet for websites like YouTube. 

  The research was done mostly through the Internet in order to learn about the forms and conventions as well as further research into audience and synopsis ideas. This eventually consisted of acquiring the skills to embed and share necessary footage and clips found in order to support the research and information collected. Compared to when doing the preliminary task, we found the use of the blog a lot easier once we felt comfortable with how it operates and how our work should be presented.

    The planning aspect of the process highly consisted of being able to represent and show in our coursework where our location is and who our cast are. This was done all through being able to embed images onto the blog. This process required our IT skills which enabled us to use technological convergence via mobile phones to send our research to our computers and then post on the blog. 

   The research stage of this process required countless uses of technologies such as Using YouTube and Google (which we were already familiar with) to research thriller films, their conventions and sub-genres, we harnessed both websites to conduct a full examination of the genre. The specification for our film stated that we could not use copyrighted music, and therefore we needed to find a source of suitable, non-copyrighted music to use in our media product which we did through the free play music website.

 

After analyzing the equipment we learned to use from our preliminary task, the use of them has become more understood by each user. The fact that the SD cameras are portable, miniature and user friendly have made it easier for amateur producers like us to be able to produce decent footage with this equipment such as the camera as well as the tripod.  In terms of the technology of the camera, the negative factors of it was the minimal control we have of certain things: these include the auto focus and auto white balance which can change the sense of some scenes recorded from different angles - we have seen this happen in some of our practice footage. The auto white balance seemed to be lagging sometimes during to work through this, we created adequate lighting so that it doesn’t change as much filming from different angles.  Other negative aspects to keep in mind are the quality of the footage, which evidently affects the quality of the film as a whole. As well as the built in sound system that we had to work with which quite frankly had poor quality sound, we also decided prerecord some of our dialogue to ensure it was as clear as possible to the audience.

   The final process of producing this product was the post-production stage where the elements were separated into three steps: uploading and organizing footage, adding transitions then including sounds. This process was all done on Adobe premiere pro CC software which was new software for all of us. Therefore the use of this technology required some getting used to and exploration into what we could produce with it. All of our filming was imported into Premiere pro. Adobe premiere is not a free. Therefore, it is considered to an industry standard if not the best. It is aimed at the "Pro-consumer" - whereby the users are producers and consumers.

There were positive and negative outcomes with regard to using the Premiere pro, analyzing the benefits would be the format we could create with it. Through our experience, we have found that the most beneficial aspect of the premiere pro is The software is non-linear and non-destructive, which means that clips can be edited around experimentally without any permanent damage also that all editing and all footage uploaded is instantly saved without having to press save at the end of each session. 

How Adobe looks

Example of an early stage of post production, we used adobe after effect to create the typo text

    This prevented us from losing work the various times were our laptop died because of low battery or froze because of pressing a wrong button. However, this software was suitable for what we wanted to do with the film. In addition we used After effect to create the typo text and windows live movie maker to create the opening titles. 

    Moreover Adobe premiere has 100s of useful and helpful contents. The software has preloaded sounds, scores, files, transitions and effects. This makes the production easier and user friendly as most steps are straightforward. However the only negative aspect is that it can be a little slower compared to its competitors. While the interface itself is user-friendly, it can be a little sluggish at times especially with less powerful machines. There will be occasional delays here and  there no matter what machine you are using. 3D editing is also non-existent.