Evaluation Q6

6)

What have you learnt about technologies from the processes of constructing this product ?

During the construction of our thriller film we learnt about several aspects of the different technology involved in constructing, not just a thriller, but any genre film.

One of the first things we learnt to use was the camera that we were using, which was my own compact camera. We chose to use this camera over the school cameras because we though that is would be easier to capture/copy the footage onto the computers that we were using and to start editing them. However we found this difficult because of the programs that we were using, which was originally Adobe Premiere Elements 1 for the other people in our group who were editing on the school computers, and Serif Movie Plus SE (a free program) for us as we were editing on my own laptop. We found that both programs would not open the raw footage produced by my camera, however we solved this by buying a add-on for the program on my laptop and converting the footage to a format that would work on the school computers. Eventually though we found that the program that we were using was not providing the results we were hoping for and I managed to buy a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 10, which we found to be a much more capable piece of software.

Another problem that we had to overcome was that of lighting. We found that the camera itself would sometimes record slightly darker than the scene actually was. This lead us to re-record a large proportion of the scenes with more ambient lighting as we did not have access to studio lighting that would have been available to thriller films with higher budgets than we did.

Another piece of technology that we use extensively throughout the production of our thriller was Youtube. We used this primarily for looking for clips from other thriller films for inspiration. We also found that there were many videos of other thriller films made by people also doing Media studies. There was also a great many videos providing us with examples of the thriller genre. We also had to learn to use Blogger for our blogs. This involved us embedding videos, as well as prezis and documents from other online services such as scribd.