Evaluation 6

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

In the process of making the movie, we had used a variety of hardware, software and Internet sites. When using these tools to make the video, I had learnt various things while playing around with these elements to see which factor is best suited for the scene.

We have used a range of hardware such as ‘Samsung NX300 camera’, Manfrotto pixi mini tripod and microphone from the laptop (Toshiba). When using ‘Samsung NX300 camera’, we were able to zoom in and out without any problems. We were able to change the setting of how bright or dark you wanted the shot to look. The camera has a function to choose either ‘Manual Focus (MF)’ or ‘Auto Focus (AF)’, MF is when you personally turn the focus into blurriness either the background or the foreground but when you select the AF it automatically focuses mostly the foreground for you. When I had to choose between these two options, I picked the MF because it would be easier for me to focus in and out of the background. This is because we wanted the scene to look interesting rather than just scenes which included different shots of focused background and foreground. Therefore, to make the scene entertaining, we put together both focus of background and foreground together without having two different shots for it. Manfrotto pixi mini tripod is used to keep our camera still. We weren’t able to find a big tripod, so we decided to use this on instead. While using this tripod we faced with some problem such as not being able to keep the camera in the same height as the character. So, to overcome this problem we used either low angle or high angle where the actor is sitting down on the floor. This made it easier to keep the camera steady as I didn’t have to carry the camera in my hand, which would have made the scenes unstable. Not only that, when we had to shoot the medium shots I made that scene as a point of view so even if it was a bit instable it wouldn’t have matter that much as it’s from a point of view, but I had to make sure not to make the scene too shaky. Also, at the beginning of the scene, when Ethan was going up the stairs I had to move the tripod and the camera along the way he was walking towards and it was quite hard to pan when using the tripod as the red button to move the camera around was quite strong; making the pan scene have the stopping effect. Therefore, I didn’t use any scenes with had panning. In my opining, this scene was the hardest because I had to make sure the scene wasn’t unstable. Lastly, I used microphone from my laptop to record the breathing sound of Ethan when he was running in the nightmare. The breathing sound didn’t sound too bad as I had made sure there was no sound at the background.

Not only that, we has also used a range of Software: Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014, IMovie, Garage band, Photoshop and voice recorder to make our movie. We had edited the video by using ‘Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014’ and ‘IMovie’, we has used two different app to edit the video because we had two apps for editing and we wanted to perceive how these apps worked and find out what it is able to provide us terms of having different editing elements such as video transitions and effects. Garage band is used to produce the background music for our video. This is one of the main elements, which would make the video more appealing by creating suspense because in all the suspense scenes background music is used to create a certain atmosphere to make the audience feel entertained. Without the background music our video would look boring as it would be hard to deliver the suspense atmosphere without the background music. This factor is related to all the main-stream movies which would be tedious if the background music isn’t added. We had used Photoshop to create our logo for our production, ‘Big Dreams Production’. By making our logo we were able to make any kind of thriller based movie because we didn’t have to find a specific production which mostly releases thriller-psychological based movie. This means we didn’t have to waste time on searching for the right production. Even thought, making the production logo took long it was worth it as we can easily say that this production only releases thriller-psychological based movies similar to our own movie. Finally, we used a voice recorder to record the breathing sound because the actual audio for the video wasn’t too clear because of the noises for the background (aeroplane) and the wind.

Lastly, I have used computer software and internet sites to publish the work I had been doing: Blogger, Prezi, YouTube, Microsoft word, Microsoft Excel. I have used Microsoft word to type all my work and amend it when it’s needed and Microsoft Excel was used to collect all the results from my questionnaire and turn it into pie charts. This made it easier for me to analyse what my target audience actually preferred to watch. Blogger was the most important one out of all elements listed above because it is a website, which I used to publish all my coursework, which included all the evaluations and videos. Prezi was used to make the evaluations/information look interesting as it has a different format/layout than the one blogger had, which looked quite dull. I had used YouTube to search for the trailers for the movies I had evaluated and also, for the research to give us an idea of what our background music should sound like.