Evaluation Q6

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

During the process of making our opening sequence, we used various pieces of technology and programmes to help us create the finished product. Throughout the research period, we used programmes and web applications to illustrate our findings and develop our film.

The most frequently used and most obvious technology we used throughout our research period would be "Blogger", This website allowed us to store and easily show off our research as well as add in links, sound clips, videos and images. This was extremely beneficial for me as I have learnt how to create and write a blog as well as improve my knowledge of computers and ICT. 

Conversion was also a big factor in pre production, I had to convert files into PDF and learn how to convert regular links into embed links. Another thing I used was "Survey Monkey", I used this online survey website in order to create our questionnaire for the reflection on our overall finished film. I found this to be extremely useful and it also allowed me to produce result charts which were beneficial for my review of these findings.

CeltX is a media pre-production software, designed for creating and organizing media projects like screenplays, films and videos. This software was free to use and was extremely effective for writing a professional looking script quickly and efficiently. We used this software to write our script for "Epidemic", This meant we had to write out our entire script and add in the various cues and character lines, which did take longer than we initially expected. There were also different settings that allowed one to distinguish factors such as dialogue as well as action movements which was beneficial for those acting within the film and it made it much easier on our filming day.

During filming the equipment we used a "Sony Handcam" as well as a Tripod. These technologies were used in order for us to film our shots needed to produce our film. In my opinion, this was a very good camera to use for our film as it was easy to use and it was also easily portable and the fact that it was a naturally handheld camera meant it was much more effective at recording our shaky, point of view shots. We used the tripod for all other shots other than those that were point of view, we did this in order for our shots to look still and professional. However we did find that the tripod jammed sometimes when we tried to do our panning shots and therefore we had to retry on some of our takes. 

Since nobody in our group really had experience handling cameras this aspect of technology use was quite difficult. This meant that we had to learn how to handle the camera technically for our film, For example, altering the focus and zooming in and out. One thing we struggled when using the camera was coordination, it was found that numerous shots had to be redone due to the fact the camera handler had the lense partly obscured, blocking out some of the shot. Finally, we didn't produce enough shots in order to keep the continuity and so we had to add in jump cuts

The Apple Mac computer was also one of the main technologies I had used through out the production of our sequence.

Final Cut Express was essential in the editing aspect of our film. All footage completed on our camera was uploaded onto this software which allowed us to then construct and tie together our opening sequence. We split, trimmed, merged and also added both effects and sound effects as well as organising the various clips into order to end up with our final product. In the opening news scene, we used a Green screen to display the background of our local town in motion and this could be easily applied through the use of this application. If we didn't use this, and instead opted for a different movie editor, such as windows movie maker, The quality of our film may have been less professional and this has an impact on how the audience may perceive our film. 

Our title sequence was created using Adobe Premire Pro, The main reason for this was because this was the only software we had access to at the time, nevertheless we think we did an excellent job with our title sequence, However had our title sequence been more complex then creating it using this software would have become increasingly difficult, thankfully we adopted for a simple yet effective opener. This was easily imported onto final cut pro with no real issues.

For my other evaluation questions, I tried and used other softwares out to see which ones would be best to present my answer.

Powerpoint was a programme that I was familiar with and so this is the one I started with, the obvious reasons I used this was to add a new dimension to how I presented my information and for it to be easily compacted within a blog post, I used SlideShare in order to create an embed link after I had uploaded my work to this site. The disadvantage about Powerpoint is that it is reasonably outdated and is doesn't really have any other features other than presenting information.

Prezi was a very creative way to produce my evaluation as it visually communicated what I wanted to say and made my presentation much less boring. After using it I find it much more effective than powerpoint, but on the contrary it takes a lot longer to produce the same amount of information, which isn't good when in a rush. 

Finally, I used iMovie to create my video answer to evaluation question two. I found iMovie to be extremely difficult to use and also had trouble aligning photos and text correctly, my relatively short clip took much longer than I expected and if I used this application for editing together my film then I highly doubt the film would be of any quality at all.