What I have learnt about new technologies during the construction process of my product?
Published on Feb 12, 2016
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What I have learnt about new technologies during the construction process of my product?
Photo by Northern Wolf Photography
Blogging
Throughout my course this year all of my work and production has been documented on a blog on blogger.com. As I have never blogged before this was something I have had to learn to use. Blogging was a really useful way to keep track of my progress and keep all of my planning in one place, and it was a great way to see who your blog was useful to and on top of this I could look at other people's blogs to see how far they had come and what their products were like, giving me a good comparison to work with when creating the product. The organisation of the blog would be the best part for me, however the posts could be temperamental at times causing a few issues when uploading posts.
Photo by DeaPeaJay
Online Programmes
When presenting our findings in both the planning and evaluation stages of our opening sequence, we ensured the use of many different programmes to present ideas in ways that were creative and more visually appealing. The programmes I've used throughout the process include Timetoast, Surveymonkey, Microsoft Powerpoint, Excel and Word, Prezi, Voki, Spiderscribe, WIX and Windows Movie Maker, on top of other presentation methods like storyboards, posters and diary entries documenting progress throughout filming.
Photo by Mohammed Nairooz
. The programmes that I most enjoyed using were Prezi and Spiderscribe, however with the free version of Spiderscribe, it meant that you could only have a limited number of photos in your documents, which explains why there aren't any in my second presentation for task 9 (Representation in Films).
. The reasons I preferred them are because they were relatively easy to use, they follow the style of a mindmap, allowing whoever is reading it to follow my trail of thoughts and express my ideas in clear sections.
Photo by Mohammed Nairooz
Youtube
As we were using a blog to present our research and construction, it meant that our videos had to be uploaded online in order to receive an embed code, as it meant that the videos had to be embedded onto the blog through HTML codes. This was alright except that when you converted your videos into a piece of film on iMovie, it took them ages to create the file which has to go on Youtube. This meant that it elongated the process of getting the tasks onto the blog, especially in hour long sessions, because it could sometimes take up to 3 hours.
Photo by jm3
iMovie
For creating and editing our videos, we used a piece of editing software designed for mac computers called iMovie. Before starting AS Media Studies I had never used iMovie before, and i found it quite difficult to use at first but it became simpler to use as the task went on.
The main issue with iMovie is that it it specialised and only downloadable on an Apple Mac, and because I only have a PC at home, it meant that I couldn't do an editing at home, only at school during lessons and free time.
Photo by Rego - d4u.hu
iMovie
iMovie was good to use because it had a wide variety of editing techniques to choose from, and was simple to use for a beginner who hasn't used it before. I have learnt a lot throughout this project through using iMovie. For example creating continuity between cross cuts in order to make the sequence smooth by adjusting the pace of the shot and the positioning of shots in the sequence. We learnt to use this throughout the movie so it looked a better quality, and put it in an order the most understandable and engaging for the audience.
Photo by Rego - d4u.hu
Camera Work
The main differences between our final product and our preliminary task were the types of camera used, but also the use of a tripod.When filming our preliminary task we used a school camcorder, which gave us very poor quality visuals and sound as well. On top of this the camcorder had a lag of a couple of seconds which we didn't take into account when filming, therefore the first part of speech in each shot has been partially cut off.
Photo by guilherme-pavan
Camera Work
When filming the first and second opening sequence ideas, we used a canon DSLR which I had had no experience with, so learning to use it was a big thing I learnt over the construction process.The DSLR gave us a much crisper quality for the video which made it look much more professional like we'd hoped for. We also used a Jessops tripod which gave us much smoother tilts, pans and zooms because they were less jumpy and wonky. However sometimes the tripod would alter the speed at various points in the camera movement because they can be hard to control and some parts in the movement move easier than others.
Photo by guilherme-pavan
Sound
To find sound for our opening sequences we needed to learn to make our way around and download music from sites such as BenSound and Youtube which are examples of websites with access to royalty free music, which we had to use in order to avoid copyright infringement.
Photo by Thomas Hawk
Sound
We knew from planning that we were going to use music for the sound in our sequence rather than a voiceover because we decided that it would be more effective to convey the emotions in the sequence to the audience.Originally we wanted to use slow christmas music so that so that it would reflect the atmosphere in the sequence, but when choosing it we decided it would look too tacky and not fitting enough.
Photo by Thomas Hawk
Sound
Therefore, we changed the music for our sequence a few times until we could find one that was most interesting and engaging for thee audience. We eventually settled on a piece of royalty free music from youtube which is a piano instrumental, reflective of the mood in our opening sequence, as you can see in task 19 (sound).
Photo by Thomas Hawk
