Evaluation Question 6

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

Before we began constructing our film I didn't have much knowledge of the technologies used for it. I now know a lot more about what's used and how. Here's a list of the technologies that I've learnt about:

Blogger - Blogger is a website that allows you to create a blog for free. We used this for writing about everything to do with the production of our film opening and for sharing videos and audio related to the film. This is good as it allows us to have all of our coursework in one place and organised, and it also allows other people to see what we have been doing and read what we have written about things related to the slasher genre. Blogger has also allowed me to put up a poll about the slasher genre as well as letting me receive feedback on my work quickly and easily.

Blogger New Post

iMovie - iMovie was what we first used to edit out footage. Although we were limited to what we could do, it did allow us to focus on the basics of editing so we learnt to get things such as the continuity of footage right before moving onto adding blue filters, for example, to our work.

Final Cut Express - After a short while iMovie became annoying to use because it was so limited, so using Final Cut Express gave us a lot more options for editing. This was important to us in editing our final cut as we needed to give some shots a CCTV style look, and we needed to make outside in the daytime look as though it was during the night. We were able to do this through the video filters available in Final Cut. We also used multiple layering which was not available in iMovie, but was an important part in creating anchorage that the victim was drunk when he was out.

Camcorders - No one in our group had much experience with camcorders so we learned how to use these to film our footage. The cameras we used were not very expensive compared to the cameras used by a lot of filmmakers, however they were good for what we needed them for.

A camcorder similar to the one we filmed with

DivShare - DivShare can be used to upload audio files, so we used this free online resource to upload our podcasts. We then used the embed code to put the podcasts onto our blogs. This was useful as Blogger doesn't allow you to directly upload audio files to your blog.

Scribd - I used Scribd to upload our treatment and post it to my blog. Scribd allows you to upload documents for other people to read, so was very useful for our treatment.

We used Scribd to upload our treatment

LiveType - I used LiveType to create my company ident. I was surprised at how many options there were for creating my ident on LiveType, and I think that people's idents that were made using it were all quite good.

GarageBand - I used GarageBand to write and record our soundtrack. I was surprised that you could use the computer's keyboard as an instrument along with the different instrument sounds that were on GarageBand. I think that it can be quite slow and difficult using the computer's keyboard to play the soundtrack, however I think the end result sounds good.

YouTube - We created an account on YouTube which allows us to upload our videos and post them onto our blog using the embed code. YouTube also has a comments feature so people have the option to give us feedback for our work through that.

We were able to upload our music video and rough cuts to YouTube

Twitter - I already have Twitter but for creating this account we read Twitter's advice for businesses, as we thought that this would be relevant for our account. Twitter has allowed us to interact with people on a global scale and lets people follow us to see the latest news about our film opening.