Evaluation Question 6

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

All of the different types of technology we have used to create our media product so far have been completely new to me and so I started out as a beginner and had to learn along the way. This was the same for the other members in my group and so, in a way, this was good because it meant we could all work together and get to grips with the task ahead as a team, all at the same level. We started our blogs first and, instead of throwing ourselves straight into it, we each spent about an hour in class just becoming familiar with the website and the tools in which we used to achieve good blog posts. for further help in using blogger I used:


http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/blogger/ 

We worked out how to position images, change styles of fonts and the basic formatting skills for blog posts, this didn't take very long to master however and we felt like naturals already. After a few weeks of uploading posts and all of our research, we thought that including videos in our actual blog would help make it more interesting and set it out from some of the others. None of us knew how to do this however and so I researched for online tutorials and step by step instructions on how to upload videos onto Blogger. It was fairly simple in the end and we managed to include YouTube clips of existing thriller films which helped to aid our research and emphasis the points we were making.

As well as learning about the blogging world we also had to embark on a seemingly tricky journey to film our opening sequence, even though there were a few problems at the start we accomplished it fairly successfully. The equipment we were using was, once again, new to all of us and but this was exciting because it meant we were able to do something new and learn new skills. We had a DV camera and a tripod. The camera wasn't anything special as it didn't have high quality resolution of image and it also picked up all background sound but we worked it to our advantage. We ensured that we only had sound we needed in each scene by filming in quiet locations and if we couldn't do this then we decided to just mute the sound in the particularly noisy scenes during editing anyway. In terms of clear image and lighting, this was an obstacle. In our shooting schedule I made sure to plan it very carefully with all the timings and filming periods so that we could have as much or as little light as we needed. For example, for the graveyard scene, it needed to be a summers evening but because we were filming during winter we had to shoot in the afternoon otherwise it would get too dark for us to carry on. Apart from this the camera worked wonders and we were able to edit some of the lighting in some scenes, for it to look darker, after filming as well. The other piece of equipment we used was the tripod. It was not in good condition because it had been used a lot by previous students and so was quite worn out. The screw which enabled it to become taller or shorter was stiff and so at times we had to balance the tripod on a chair or try to hold it steady. The top of the tripod which allows the camera to pan across a shot was also loose or even at times quite stiff. This took up quite a lot of filming time because one of our shots was a pan across, following the husband, who arrives home and walks through the hall way. In the end we managed to get it to work but only with a clicking sound going with it and so we were a bit disappointed with it. We decided to cut that shot out of our opening sequence and just show the husband taking his coat off. This means that the initial plan from the story board had been altered.

Our media product wouldn't be anything without sound. We needed a musical score to play in the background for tension to be built up. We used the website “Free Play” to source some copyright free music and sound effects. It took a long time to find the right kind of music we were looking for because there were just hundreds of tracks to choose from. We had to type in key words such as “murder”, “tension” and “eerie”, into the search box to find the music and yet sometimes the tracks didn't have much relation to those key words so it could get frustrating. We spent a week listening to music and eventually downloaded six different tracks to mix and match throughout the opening, title sequence. Then was the next challenge, adding all the music we had gathered together to the footage we had edited.

During the time of editing the footage we had tried to use a variety of different cuts for example a quick cut montage for the murder scene. This meant that the music had to be synchronised with the timing of the film and this was quite hard. I had to cut a lot of the music and then re-position the introductions of certain sound effects and fade certain parts in and out. I spent a lot of time doing this because it needed to be just right in order for tension to be built up, for there to be audience expectation and for the general flow of the opening sequence, depending on whether it was a fast or slow scene. Once I had worked out how to use I-movie and how to use the tools to achieve certain affects then it was easy to use. I managed to make different shots seem faded or darker, an example of this in our work is, during the flash back, a special effect transition has been used to exit and enter a different scene. I did this with the music as well by turning up the volume in some areas or by overlapping two different tracks.