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

Since we began constructing this product, I have learnt a great deal in concern to technology; especially with blogs, and new websites that enabled me to upload my work in word documents,  PowerPoint presentations, and diagrams and embed them to my blog via websites such as Prezi, Slideshare, audioboo, and scribd. These helped me a great deal, and I also found it enjoyable learning skills that will be useful later on in life as well as in media studies.

I have learnt that technologies give us a wider range of information than I originally thought, and new websites such as IMDB, and fimsite, helped me to develop my understanding on the thriller genre, and noir films, and the reasoning behind them.

Using blogs enabled me to access my work, wherever and whenever necessary, without carrying vast amounts of paper. It also enabled me to look at the one another’s work, with ease, to give advice, and inspire ideas for our thrillers. It also enabled me to receive useful feedback from tutors, which enabled me to add revisions in order to improve my work.

I have learnt the importance of technology when organising filming times, with peers.  Me and Ruby, found this a struggle, as we both weren’t free when our actors where, or vice versa, which is why we used ourselves instead, this made filming and organisation much easier.  We realised that having less people in the group made it much easier to co-operate, concentrate and crack on.

I also learnt that new technologies can change the meanings of a single shot for example using low angle shots of someone can make them appear powerful and important, and that editing film in a certain way, can change the narrative structure completely and therefore change the meaning of the film altogether, as well as making it much clearer and smoother.  It took a while for us to arrange our footage in an order that we were pleased with, and that made sense to the audience.

Since we started editing our film, I learnt how to capture footage onto the computer, in order to edit my footage, I then picked up how to navigate around ‘Adobe Premiere Elements’ quite quickly. Through the process of editing our film, I learnt how to ‘razor’ the footage in order to re-size the footage to suit the film, I also learnt how to use various effects and transitions, such as ‘Dip to Black’ and ‘Cross Dissolve’ both which are used in our film. The Dip to black helped to make things look much smoother and darker, more tension and build up, while the cross dissolve helped us to create the flash between the homeless girl and the man at the desk, it made it smooth and created an effect which me and Ruby were very pleased with.

I have learnt to use video cameras and additional add ons such as tripods to a great extent, I am now very confident when setting them up and using them.  I learnt that tripods are very useful when filming as they help to prevent the shake and jolts that appear in the film when filming by hand.

I learnt that technology doesn’t work very well in the dark, unless we have high-tech lighting and equipment, we struggled to fit filming in after school, as by the time we had walked to the destination of filming, it was quite dark already.   Luckily we managed to use some of the film which we did during dark hours, due to the fact there was a glare shining on me, which we found very intriguing, and lucky.

 I leant that I need to be patient when it comes to technology and not to panic if something goes wrong, because the likelihood is, that there is a solution and a way to solve the problem, so I think I have learnt not to jump to conclusions too quickly and instead have a clear head ready to tackle the problem head on.