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

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

In the editing and overall production of our thriller opening, we had to make sure that we used I-movie. This was a new experience for me as I previously have had little experiences using this particular programme. For this, we had to come together as a team and use our initiative in order to edit our film. This wasn’t too helpful as we didn’t have full knowledge of what we could and couldn’t do in terms of effects and pacing. Eventually we got used to it though and managed to edit out all continuity errors using fast-paced cutting between scenes and using particular shots like ‘over-the-shoulder’ shots and ‘cut-away’ shots that cut away to another scene, in order to keep the audience’s attention away from errors and seeing things that were not supposed to be seen during the production.

We had many issues with catching shadows of ourselves and the tripod in the film. We filmed our thriller in daylight where the sun was quite high in the sky, meaning that we struggled to overcome the problem of shadows. Any high-angle shots we tried to shoot, usually caught the shadow of the tripod in it and by the time we had started we could not change sides as we had to make sure that our filming did not include too much of our surroundings in it as we were filming at an owned house.  

We also had to make sure we stuck to the 180 degree rule, meaning that we had to stick with what we were doing and alter camera position constantly in order to keep the sun from causing issues for us. Also, the movement of light is noticeable in our production, as, due to pauses and position altering, by the time we had gone through all the motions, the sun had moved meaning that any shots we had were not continuous on the lighting side of things. We could have solved this by filming another day as well so the sun hadn’t moved but it turned out that we were quite happy with our shots at the time and just wanted to get straight into putting our production together.

 

We had terrible problems with continuity in the making of our production. Luckily, the way that we edited it managed to hide many of our errors as we were able to cut away to other shots like the trains and the credits which allowed us to mask any continuity issues. The main reason behind our continuity errors was that we didn’t take enough shots and as we only filmed each shot a couple of times, in some cases, there seemed to be something wrong with it that we missed when we were filming it. Things like someone talking in the background, shadows were caught on camera and props that weren’t being used being seen in the background of a shot. That meant that a lot of the shots that we took were useless and we couldn’t put them in the final edition of our thriller opening, meaning we had to come up with alternative ways to maintain a solid plot, without all of the necessary shots.

 

This shot had to be put in due to a lack of shots able to replace it but due to some fast-paced editing, we managed to avert the audience’s attention away from this fairly large error.

I also used Prezi in my research and this evaluation. This was my first time ever using Prezi.I have found it to be a very useful website as it allows you to present all your ideas in a simple but creative way that seems to be a lot more imaginative than using boring and fiddly programmes such as PowerPoint where the animation and slide transitions are hard to use and it takes a long time to get it to look just right. This made my work a lot more presentable and made it easier to brainstorm our ideas and present them in a more exciting and a better-looking way.

 

I made 3 Prezi’s, one was the inspirations for our thriller opening which can be found in my research and planning sections. This Prezi involved 4 different slides outlining our inspiration for our use of trains, dramatized acting, plot and the idea of using a damsel in distress to cause uncomfortable emotions amongst the audience. This ‘damsel in distress’ idea worked fairly well as it made the audience feel sorry for her and made the audience go through the ‘don’t want to look’ emotions. Another one of the Prezi’s that I made was included in this evaluation of my thriller opening. This Prezi is outlined in question 1 of my evaluation and shows how our production challenges the typical conventions of a thriller film. This Prezi has 5 slides and shows within each scene, how the typical conventions of the thriller genre are challenged and how they are followed within each specific scene of our production. The final Prezi I produced was shown in question 4 of the evaluation and outline the audience’s opinions of the strengths and weaknesses of our production, also showing how the strengths outweighed the weaknesses using the scales theme of Prezi.

I also used Wordle twice within the creation of my evaluation. This is another program I have never used until this media project, although it is fairly simple to use. Unfortunately the HTML code to input it into blogger makes it comes out extremely pixelated so you have to screenshot it to get it to import properly, allowing me to hone my skills and learn how to screenshot effectively and crop to the right size for what I am trying to show. The two Wordles I have created are; The Roles within Filmmaking and Professional Production Companies. Wordle is an effective and good-looking way of listing things, making it a popular website to use when work can be made ‘text-heavy’ as it allows you to brain storm all your ideas into a good-looking and well-presented list of words in many different colours, fonts and rotations.


Here is an example of a Wordle i made, outlining how it makes a list of words look less boring and much more presentable.