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

Research and Planning:

For much of our research and planning we used blogger. This site enabled us to be able to share all our work to the public and each other  while also being able to take inspiration and ideas from other peoples blogs. The simple format made it easy to write and upload our work and then respond to feedback from teachers, this helps also improve our work to a higher standard. The use of blogger also meant the use of other media services as well, for example prezi. Prezi allows users to display work in a mind map format, this is useful when coming up with ideas as other users can also be invited into your prezi, this was key when coming up with ideas for props and shots when initially planning our thriller as everyone in the group could collaborate and input into it with ease. The finished product can then be embedded into a blogger post like so 

and now when this is posted everyone else can see it and possibly take influence from it to further improve on their own work.
Another great site for research and planning is youtube. If you didn't know youtube is a video social media site that allows users to upload videos and for others to watch them. This was great when planning our thrillers as we could watch other peoples work and also real media products to help influence what our thriller could be based on and what it would look like. It also gave a platform for our final products to be presented on. After this the video can be embedded onto blogger just like the prezi

it can then be viewed by everyone who checks this blog and then the cycle of influence and better quality products continues.

Production:

To film our thriller Evito we used an Canon HD camera. The benefits of using a camera like this are far more vast than just the HD quality of the footage, although this does give our final product a much more professional finish than it otherwise would. One of these benefits would be the simplicity of the camera, unlike more expensive and better quality cameras the one we used was effortless. When filming all we had to do was press record and occasionally zoom for certain shots, by having this ease with filming the whole process became smoother and the shoot took less time than it could have if a more complicated camera had been used. Another benefit also is that the camera had an attached screen which meant we could watch back footage on site and act accordingly, if a shot wasn't good enough we would know there and then and could re shoot it to the standard we want. Without this feature we would have been clueless about the quality of our raw footage and it would have been to late to re shoot if we only found out when we got back to school and watched it on a computer as our location was quite far away and would have been inconvenient.

To help store all the footage we used SD cards, these go into the camera and can be plugged into the computer and then put onto the editing software, they are light, small and very portable, this makes using them easy and they're very convenient.

Post Production:

When editing we used Adobe Premiere Pro, this software allows us to easily edit all of our footage in a non linear way, this means that any part can be edited at any point in time, this was essential when editing as if we realised something wasn't good enough or it didn't fit in our film then we could remove it even if it was at the beginning of the thriller. This meant we had full control when editing, making the whole process easier. Another benefit is the program can edit the footage and produce the HD final product, this meant that our thriller looked more professional, not only this but the software also comes with other editing tool other than just being able to move the footage into place. Some of these include colour correction and grading, this enables us to change how our raw footage looks, for example to look colder and nastier. Another option is the ability to change sound levels and to add non diegetic sound (sound effects). Having the ability to change sound levels made it so that we could make the thriller smoother and less jumpy, if one clip has loud wind noises then that clip can have that reduced as to fit the next clip, this makes the thriller flow better. Sound clips can also extended from one clip into another, this results in a seamless transition. As well as being able to edit the diegetic sound recorded on scene we can also add sound effects to further improve our work and give a more professional finish. This was effortless to do, we simply went onto a sound effect website, searched for what we required, downloaded it and then import it into Premiere, at this point we can then do what we want with it.