Question 6 - Technology

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

When researching and creating our film open we used a variety of software and hardware, for research we mainly used google to investigate different films of our chosen genre for references, and found websites like 'The Numbers' and 'Box Office Mojo'. Which we used quiet frequently to research into film distribution and demographics.

We used YouTube to find all of our film openings we used as references in our research and planning, from genres similar to ours and also to find inspirations and ideas from other student products on there. The 'embed' button came in very useful to put YouTube clips on our blogs. This made it easy to evaluate other students work and give something to reference it by. The only negative was the schools internet protection and monitoring service 'Impero', which blocks videos that include key words set by the admins, which sometimes made useful videos unobtainable, this is a good piece of software for school but can inconvenience use when searching for videos like 'The Godfather' which contains graphic violence.

A large majority of our coursework was done using 'Blogger', this is a blogger service which allows posts to be make and kept up to date easily. Blogger really helped us keep our coursework together and in he right order, it also allowed changes to be made easily to blogs that we had received feedback on from our teacher, which means improving our work was easy. I have never used any kind of blogging service but with this i soon learned and was made very easy to use and pick up.


Another major resource we used for our work was 'Prezi', this is a power point/presentation service that is very useful to for making large 3D power points that we can easily embed onto our blogs. It was also very user friendly and easy to use, we used it in our bigger pieces of coursework so that its not layed out to be just big blocks of text, but more of an interactive power point that can include lots of pictures and is stylized differently each time.

For our filming we used a equipment for the first time such as; a camera, tripod and microphone. we all had some experience with a camera but not in an assessed way, so it was a first for us all to mount the camera on a tripod and use it efficiently. It was quite easy to use after we were told the basics form our teacher, a lot of the time we were just experimenting with them all in combination to find good ways to use them, such as tilts and heights, as well as taking into account technical aspects such as lighting a scenes. After we had done the preliminary task using them we had got the hang of it, making the official film opening much smoother to film.

For the final stage of production, the editing, we used 'Sony Movie Studio Platinum'. This software is for editing clips and film footage into videos. We spent a long time using this as the editing is a major part of any film, we had some experience using editing software between us so the process went well, and allowed us to take full advantage of all the effects that the software had to offer making our finished product a very good quality video.

In conclusion, we learnt a lot from all of these technologies during the production of our media film opening, making us confident about using the entire range of equipment and software at our disposal in media productions, no doubt giving us an advantage in future projects in A2 media.