Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout our films planning and research, Film production and Evaluation, a multitude of technologies were used to help create the end product, our film opening. Some of the variety of hard and software used had not been used before, so it really was trial and error whilst using some of the technology.

In the early stages of the planning, we investigated action films (our chosen genre) simply by watching some DVD’s. After this we researched the statistics behind some of the most successful action films, and also into target audiences.

Google really was the ‘gateway’ to our online research and helped us find anything we needed in terms of research, using Google was what led us to viewing websites such as ‘The Numbers’ and ‘IMDB’, which gave us ideas, and information relevant to our production.

Another form of online technology which played a helping hand was the use of YouTube. Whilst using the site, we could look through other action film openings, previous AS film openings of a similar nature and any other film clips of interest. By doing this we could highlight any particular conventions we wanted to follow or avoid in our film, as well as pick up on any

difficulties or errors made in other films.

Through the use of YouTube we could then analyse these previous film openings and finally grasp an idea of what we might want in our production, and start to find inspiration for our own, original idea.

From start to finish the use of Blogger has been a key factor in our work. At the start of our production, I was new to this online blogging website but quickly grasped the idea of how to use it, and found it no problem at all to use. Blogger has been a very useful tool in our work, helping us to display our work, and have a fast marking system from our teacher, who could leave comments on how to improve specific pieces of our work.

Another technology that was new to me and the entire group was the online presentation website, Prezi. The use of Prezi was also a huge part to our early production, and post production work which enabled detailed presentations to be linked to our blogs. Prezi is another great example of useful software.

In the editing process of our films, we used some more software on our computers that were relatively new to us, Photoshop and Movie Studio Platinum 12.0. Using these programs was quite difficult at first but we eventually got the hang of them, and found the many different editing tools on the Movie Studio particularly effective and useful.

However there were some problems with the use of Movie Studio Platinum, these difficulties included loss of work and freezing of the programme. These problems weren’t too bad of a setback but still proved frustrating at the time.

The Movie Studio Platinum 12.0 software was great for adding filter effects, and changing the light intensity of each scene. Which came in handy when our first day of filming was a lighter day than the second, which could of ruined our continuity.