Question 6

Q6. What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Research
For posting research and work we learned about many various technologies, again Visme being one of them but common uses for it were Padlet, Glogster, Prezi and Scribd primarily. All the way throughout our blogs are the various technologies. They are nice and easy to use since you can upload work from Powerpoint or Microsoft word and then present them using these sites, or just type it up on them and present it all your own way with their own site presentation features to add additional content to the work and prevent any possible complications with buggy presentation. This typically occurred on Padlet when uploading work, the margins and such were buggy but the way around it is to do the work manually or copy and paste it in instead of uploading it as a document. However they are easy to use and excellent for presentation and uploading essay style, planning and promotional work. I found that Scribd was the best technology to use for posting research since it was compatible for both Word and Powerpoint documents and attached images were compatible. The only downside of using these for myself was that I was running my work off a MacBook, which incidentally was unable to embed files that were on sites such as Padlet or Scribd.

Planning

Other technologies we learned were animation programmes such as Moovly and GoAnimate and those were mainly for the purpose of presentation and summarisations. I learned how to change the animation and use hand drag-in introductions and drag-outs. These are good and useful in future for attracting audiences using playful, neat and to the point animations that give a clear-cut image. However they do require a subscription to improve animations and themes, which do improve the quality and standard of the presentations on both sites. On the other hand I found an equally good presentation site called Visme that is completely free that offers Powerpoint style presentations with basic themes and pictures that are nice, simplistic and even offer external access from pictures and images off the site with its own clip art on offer. I found this very useful during the planning of our thriller and even used a part of it in our thriller pitch, which means that it can definitely be used in future regarding promotion of other future plans and productions.

Here, as seen on my blog, to present things such as job roles we used an online programme called slides which was a more simplistic version of Prezi. We chose to use this for something such as job roles in our planning because we didn't want to use anything too technical, we just wanted to establish and present each role simply. This was done by simply clicking a forward facing arrow that changed to the next slide. Each slide had a profile of each member of our group and put the information across. It is useful for presentations such as formal ones, where you want to get information across directly without distracting the audiences.

It allows you to create a slightly more advanced presentation than a Powerpoint, but again it isn't too technical and can potentially stick to a more professional format. The only downside is that there is no way to upload any presentations from Word or Powerpoint so any previous work done that is to be transferred across would have to be redone from scratch on the website. It is a subscription based website like any other, which has more features that are better as long as they are paid for which would most likely open up options to create more appealing presentations. For example, better backgrounds, animated transitions possibly and more drawing and editing options.

Preliminary
Mainly I have learned about editing and filming using IMovie since I was assigned the role of editor for the majority of our group work when filming Vox Pops, our production pitch and the preliminary task. While editing the preliminary I decided to experiment with IMovie and mess around with its features as much as possible when I noticed a break in continuity and decided I learn the crop features to see if I could remove the break and noticed the Ken Baker shot. I did keep in mind that it affected the quality to a degree and I tried it as a test in the rough edit we made of the preliminary that I could have easily removed if it didn’t work, but it made the preliminary better than the original shot where Jack’s shirt is un-tucked and his arm is lower than that of the shot before.

As you can see the quality isn’t affected too bad and it removes Jack’s shirt until zooms back out thus making error in continuity unnoticeable.

Also I learned how to attach sound to a clip, though what would have been more useful was if I’d have learned, asked for and researched a website that offered sound effects to which I didn’t have to improvise. In this case I had to edit and crop the sound of a hockey puck hitting a metal post, which still worked effectively to imitate the sound of a gunshot. Also the grey lines that are between each clip are where I split each clip and watched them all frame by frame so that I could edit out parts we either didn’t need or bad parts of a clip that we could salvage.

Production and Editing

When filming our Thriller I got to grips with a Panasonic HD video camera, in particular its focusing and camera quality settings. Now there wasn’t a feature to improve the quality of the camera in the dark and quality is reduced in darker environments so we learned to avoid that by testing to see how low the quality goes. Also we learned that zooming reduces camera quality so we avoided zooming too much in our filming but also zoomed in and out to fit and remove objects and surroundings from the frame.

Here we zoomed in slightly to remove a house from the frame that is just out of shot to the left, we didn’t want to capture it and wanted it to look like there is absolutely nothing in the surrounding area and that the character is completely isolated.

I also learned how to play with the manual focus settings very well, since they were slightly awkward to use on the camera we used, since it was a small plastic slider that had to be pushed in, then slid up or down to change focus and is rather difficult to do one-handed. Nonetheless I came to terms with it during filming and managed to capture and out of focus shot of our victim being watched by the antagonist. We learned that focus plays a key part in thrillers so the use of it was very effective and would definitely improve the quality of the actual thriller. The problems we learned with focusing in and out of images is that if there are any images you want to capture between the two are out of focus, so they have to be used in another shot or left out. We were going to use the no trespassing sign but couldn’t capture it between the antagonist and victim so we left it out. Also focus and zoom were hard to grasp since zooming would put the shot out of focus due to the autofocus being turned off, so we had to set the zoom to how we wanted it, and then put it into focus
and at certain points of zooming trying to find the point where the closer object is in focus and the farther is out of focus was very slim so we had to alter the focus marginally.

We also learned to keep the camera steady with the use of tripods and stands because camera knocks and sways make the filming look unprofessional. On my editing software I have a feature where I can reduce camera sway and knocks in which I used during the filming and editing of our Vox Pop. There is an option that allows reduction in camera sway from 0-100%, it doesn’t affect the quality but it crops the image slightly and focuses on a central area and keeps the picture centred on that, and works very effectively. It makes the film more professional, on the other hand the sway can be increased for the effect of a thriller for shots such as POV shots.          

Also, here is a brief tutorial on how I edited some of our clips and what ideas I gained whilst experimenting with the editing of our previous work:

Split Clip Tutorial by Bradley Waterhouse

 
I used my knowledge of Logic X to import the track as an audio file, all I had to do then was pitch bend the song, alter the semitones and drop the cents to make a more macabre horror feel to the song. Here is a screen recording to demonstrate how I did it. Adding to the editing of music,  it is similar to that of videos in iMovie. You can split the track at the playhead, and also drag forward and backward from the start or end of the track to cut, loop or elongate the whole thing.