Evaluation Question Six

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

Before this year, I have never even used a Mac computer before, let alone done any editing. Although I was not the ‘editor’ of our movie, as the director I felt it my duty to oversee the editing take place. We started by logging and capturing the footage, which was a lot easier for our final task than it was for our preliminary task. This was because we used a camera which needed a tape for the preliminary task, and so it took a long time to upload. For the real task we used a digital camera for ease of transporting etc, which was much easier as we just needed to put the SD card directly into the Mac computer and upload it. We learned a lot of different editorial techniques as the weeks went on, for example colour filters, which we used quite a lot in our video, and how to add credits, music etc. I feel that as a whole, I’ve learned a lot about the editing process and if I had to I could easily make edit my own sequence. That point brings me onto the subject of the camera and tripod, which again I had no former experience with. My group member and I both filmed for the opening, she shot all of the footage within the college, whereas I shot the weaponry images, as this had to be done at my house. I am glad I got the chance to use the camera and tripod for myself as it gave me more practice for next year when I may have to film a whole sequence by myself.

Online technologies we used:

Google Mail Account: In order to access Blogger, Youtube, Scribd and Bubbl.us, we first needed to create a ‘gmail’ account. Both my group member and I created our own individual account, but we also created a group account. This way we could both edit the blog when we needed to, as well as uploading anything to Youtube etc.

Blogger: It was compulsory to upload all of our work to a blog, this made it easier to complete group work as, along with our own individual blogs, we shared a blog which we could both update.

Youtube: Once completing our films, both our preliminary task and our final task, we uploaded the movies to Youtube. We found this to be a great help as we could send the link to people and they could look at the video and tell us what we could to do improve it or make it better. It also made sure the video was safe, if there were any technical problems with the computers at college, or if our video was deleted from the computer then we knew it was safely on Youtube.

Facebook: Once we had finished our first draft of ‘The Teacher’ and we had uploaded it on Youtube, I put the video on my Facebook profile so that all of my friends could comment on it and say how I could improve, what they liked etc. This was a huge help as we still had time to go back into the editing room and change the film to suit our audiences’ needs.

Scribd: We uploaded some of our documents to Scribd, the largest social publishing website on the internet. We did this because, in most cases, we had used tables on word which we could not just copy and paste onto Blogger, so we needed to convert the file into a link we could save onto Blogger, and the tables would be shown. Scribd did this perfectly.

Final Cut Pro: This was the software we used to edit our preliminary task and thriller opening. Although at first we found it extremely confusing, the more we used Final Cut Pro the more we grew accustomed to it, and things that seemed extremely hard at first suddenly seemed very simple.

Bubbl.us: Since all of the work we were doing had to be done online, we felt that doing a brainstorm on paper would be pointless. This is where Bubbl.us helped out. Not only was it much easier to upload a brainstorm we had done online, but it was also much clearer than anything we could have done on paper.

Paint: Since I have very little experience in Photoshop, I decided to keep things simple and stick to using Microsoft Paint. On here, I created our company’s logo and a very simplistic theatrical poster.

Incompetech: The soundtrack for our opening had to be royalty free, which was quite disappointing as we had quite a few ideas for our soundtrack. However, after quite a while of searching ‘Incompetech’ for a fitting score, we found our piece.