Q6 What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the making of our thriller we encountered many different technologies. I did a lot of the editing and learned key editing skills such as to use quick flashes on imovie and how to change the colour levels. I felt that the skills I provided to the editing where good as we where able to make scenes more dramatic by changing levels and transitions and also the sound. During editing we used the schools programs to provider us with technologies needed to make our opening.

In the filming stage we used my own camera and the schools tripod. As it was my own camera I knew how it worked therefore I was able to adjust the camera’s levels to deal with the lighting conditions and did this by changing the lighting mode which you could adjust to suit conditions. I feel that I have learned not only how to be technically sound with a camera, but how to use it the most efficient way possible everything from saving battery life and positioning to how I could best capture mise en-scene and how to follow the 180 degree rule. To make sure we captured the most effective shots we had regular meetings on what shots would be used .I have also progressed with regards to using different shots in a practical manner.

I have also learned to adjust different levels on different shots to fit with the conventions of a thriller. In the making of our logo we used a programme called fireworks. I used this as it provided the correct tools to create a high quality image. I used tool such as blur and sharpen to make the logo more effective

Garage Band and Logic Pro

Garage Band is another program I used in order to create the soundtracks for our piece. What garage band does is it is used to take existing default tracks, or custom made tracks to make a piece of music. Similarly to Audacity, you can edit the track and merge multiple ones together to make one master track. That’s what makes garage band unique from Audacity, however both programs deemed as useful as each other. Now, as mentioned previously, Logic Pro is very similar to garage band in the fact that they are both used primarily to create tracks aside from just editing. Logic Pro is the program installed on the Macs in the recording studio, which is how I created the soundtrack played throughout the credits. Logic Pro, is in summary a more enhanced version of garage band and used mainly within recording. With these programs we where able to make a soundtrack using different instruments and also putting together sounds that had already been made. We where also able to change the key on pre recorded music to manipulate it into our soundtracks. An example of us using pre recorded tracks would be using a fire burning track in our main soundtrack

 

Imovie

Imovie is what we used to actually edit all the clips together. We improved our footage onto and Apple Mac and began editing them using Imovie. This program became the most essential and important when it came to producing our thriller, as without this there would be no transitions, no editing techniques, and we wouldn’t have been able to add anything extra to our piece such as logo’s, music etc. Imovie works very well with Garage Band as you could make the soundtrack then simply drag into Imovie ready for use. Imovie includes such editing techniques as adding colour effects, audio adjustments, fade-ins/outs, adjusting lengths, adding titles and so on. In summary, we used it in order to make our chosen footage into a piece of work.

YouTube

YouTube is the website that we used in order to exhibit our thriller. We took it from IMovie, put it on another production called iDVD which transferred it onto a compact disk, then installed it onto a computer. From there, I put it onto my YouTube account which can be viewed by anyone in the world. We used YouTube to exhibit our thriller  because it is immensely popular and it helps us gain feedback from a target audience. This incidentally helped us on what we did well and how we could improve.

Here we was able to add non diagetic sound, transitions, photos and titles

iDVD

IDVD is software used to convert a piece of video from IMovie onto a compact disk. This helped us get it onto a disk so that we could hand it in for it to get graded, and we could make any copies for ourselves as well. From getting onto a disk, we could then put in onto any computer to watch for our own amusement and for exhibition