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

During the making of this project we learnt many new skills from various media technologies. One in particular was the use of the new Mac computers. Before beginning this project most of the people in our group had not used a Mac before and so it was a little difficult to start with as the layout is different from a ‘pc’. However after a while of searching through the computers and getting to grips to where everything was, we found it easier to work with. We used a editing program called ‘Final Cut Pro’ which was fairly straightforward to navigate around as there was a help bar at the top of the page if we needed to find a certain effect or transition we could just type it in there and it would automatically find it for us. We used this final cut pro to log and capture all out clips and then rearrange them on the timeline and then used a tool called ‘mark in/out’ to crop the parts of the clips we did not need. We used garage band to create the music soundtrack for our film, we combined a variety of different sound together such as ‘beautiful tension’ and ‘not so friendly’ and then exported it from garage band and imported it to final cut pro.

We also used the college canon digital camcorders and tripods, which were not very complicated to use as they had the basic record, pause, rewind, fast forward and play functions. The tripods were easy to assemble as they just required us to open them up using the clips that were provided. When out filming the tripods were essential as we learnt that without the tripod the camera footage is shaky and this is not the effect we were going for. We leant how to mount the camera on the tripod and make it secure. Whilst out filming we had to make sure that we recorded a gap before and after the clip we recorded so it would be easier to edit together and cut sections off without erasing the part of the clip we needed.

We also used a selection of other media technologies which helped contribute to the completing of out project. We used a number of websites to help with the research in pre-production.
We used YouTube to research other openings of films within the same genre of our project. Our genre is psychological/romantic/drama. Therefore the films we researched into were, ‘Donnie Darko’, ‘The Notebook’ and ‘Kidult hood’, as these films were of the same Genre. This helped us to gain a better understanding in the process and development of these films. We also used ‘IMDB’ to research more into these films, it told us who the production companies were who were involved in the making of the films, the running time, any bloopers and trivia, the actors and characters names, the rating of the film, the release date, genre, and who the writer and director were.

We used the website ‘Blogger’ as a way of showing others our planning and preparation for the prelimary task and the main task. It exhibits everything we did from the very beginning (planning our main task) to the very end (evaluating our main task and the final film opening video) and everything in between such as photographs of the locations we shot in, and screenshots of our project in final cut pro and garage band.