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

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

Throughout the process of constructing this product, I have learnt that technology is very important in the production of film making.

The use of technology was very useful in developing the logo for our company as it would not have been possible without the use of Photoshop - we could have made a logo similar to our final design but the quality would be nowhere near the quality it is now. To make our logo, I used an image of a moon and a wolf silhouette and merged them together after cropping them slightly and making the edges of the wolf fit the moon. I then added the title over the design and added a filter to make the moon slightly darker - which I believe made it look better.

We used YouTube to upload any videos that we needed to use on our blogs so that it was easy to upload. I also used it to find the various film opening and title sequences that I used for my research and planning.

We used Blogger to upload all of our research and planning, this is a suitable alternative to writing up the numerous posts on another application such as word and then printing and sending them to the examiner, as there are multiple posts which would equate to a large number of papers  ring sent. By uploading everything to blogger, the examiners have instant access to everyone's work and they don't need to be printed it sent off.

We used a microphone and Cubase to record the voice-overs, this allowed us to obtain higher quality audio which wouldn't have been possible a few years ago. It also meant that the quality of was higher as it is professional recording software and if we used the audio from our clips then there would be a lot of background noise.

To edit our film, we used Premier Pro which is specially designed editing software. Premier Pro allowed us to edit the software and use various editing techniques, such as: cutting clips, this meant that if one clip was too long or there was a part which didn't fit we could cut it out. Premier Pro also made the recording process a lot easier as it meant we didn't have to film all of our shots in order as we are able to move them around. We also edited the audio in certain parts, so that the voice-overs can be heard over the music for example or increasing the volume of the music when there are no voice-overs. We also used various transitions between shots to make the film play smoother, the most used transition we used was the fade to/from black as the other transitions looked to extreme for the genre we are portraying.

Facebook also played a large part in the production of our film as it allowed the members of our group to communicate with each other e.g. Notifying of possible times we could meet up to film or edit. Similarly, it allowed us to contact the people we planned to use as extras so that we could meet up. This would have been a lot more difficult a few years ago when social media wasn't as we would need to message each other back and forth, one at a time as messaging/communication wasn't as advanced then.

Word allowed us to write the script for our pitch and film a lot easier than writing the whole thing out and then editing it if there was something we didn't like.

PowerPoint was another example of software we used, we used this to make the presentations for our pitch. It allows us to present detail and images alongside the script that we made in word so that we don't need to go into as much detail with what we say as the viewers can see what we are trying to represent.

The camera we used was a Panasonic HC-V130 along with a tripod for some shots. Whilst camera are essentail in the production of a film, this model was very useful with what we were trying to achieve. It was light and easy to carry around which made filming a lot easier. The zoom on the camera was also very good; it allowed us to obtain a number of shots which wouldn't be possible with a lower quality model. While the quality wasn't as good as higher quality cameras, it was still very good considering the size, and was suitable for what we wanted to achieve.

In conclusion, I have learnt that the use of technology is very important in the production of a film as it makes the entire process much easier, from contacting team members to filming and editing.