What have you learnt about technologies
- 1. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?
- 2. What I have learnt through: research In order to construct my product, I had to research the genre I was dealing with beforehand; this lead me to learn much about the technologies that I was using in order to construct my opening sequence. On of the ways I researched the construction of an opening sequence was through watching examples of well constructed, high budget ones on Artofthetitle.com. This lead me to come across ‘This is England’, a film I gathered lots of inspiration from. Not only did I look at high budget, professional opening sequences, but I looked at A grade examples on YouTube – this showed me the types of things I should include in order to get the higher grades.
- 3. Research cont. Another way I conducted my research was audio commentaries from directors on DVDs and YouTube. This allowed me to listen to the director’s ideas and thought processes through the opening sequence in the ideas that he had to construct it and make it effective in order to draw the audience in. I did this for Layer Cake and Lawless. From this, I found that sometimes with an opening sequence less is more, as less information being thrown at an audience can confuse them less and be more effective in wanting to watch further into the film. This is reflected in Matthew Vaughn’s opening sequence. We follow a car along a road with a tracking shot before this turns into an establishing shot, showing us the country club that Daniel Craig’s character will enter.
- 4. Planning In the planning process, I have learnt that camera’s are a good technology to use for location planning and character establishment. With this, when there was more planning time in the group before we went our separate ways, I went out and took pictures of locations and possible characters, one of who I developed to be a character in my final edited opening sequence, showing that this form of technology in planning is useful and effective. This also helped me to visualise the characaters in their locations, something which then helped me to develop the direction in which I wanted my opening sequence to go in.
- 5. Here I have blogged using the camera equipment to take pictures of possible locations. I also believe that blogging was a useful technology that I learnt about during the process of constructing my product as it allowed me to learn how to keep up with work regularly and how to present the work.
- 6. The blog post I used for possible character casting.
- 7. Construction I learnt a lot about technology during the construction of my product as this was the time I most used different forms of technology. Some of the main ones useful to me were: • Cameras – I used two different types of camera in order to distinguish which I felt was best quality for my opening sequence. This allowed me to learn a lot about the different qualities of camera and I learned how to use each for recording the best footage I possibly could • Editing software – I edited my opening sequence on Sony Vegas, a fairly easy to learn yet effective programme. Using this for my first time in editing was very useful as it allowed me to grasp the basic idea of how to edit, which affected my opening sequence massively as, working on my own, a lot of the second half of the sequence used footage that was not my own, which I learned how to manipulate and change into the way I wanted the footage to be presented on the editing software.
- 8. • Filters – I used filters in the construction of my opening sequence whilst manipulating other footage. This meant that I was able to learn which looked best for the fitting into my sequence. • Sound effects – I included sound effects which I didn’t think were prominent enough in the original recording of my opening sequence. Some of these, for example, were sounds of heels on the pavement, or car doors slamming. This allowed me to learn about the technology as I would select many different sounds which I believed had the potential to fit into the sequence, placed them into it and decided which sounded the best. I also included a voice-over effect in the beginning of my opening sequence, a cross between diegetic and non-diegetic sound effects as although it was a sound that was in the actual sequence, it also transferred from one shot to another, creating more of a voice-over effect than just background noise.
- 9. Evaluation In the process of completing my evaluation, I have learnt even more about technologies. Some of these include information presenting media technologies, such as SlideShare, Prezi and Emaze. Using these allowed me to broaden the technology choices I will make in the future when presenting my work, as they are interesting and fun ways to use. Here I inserted a link to a Prezi I made for the first evaluation question Here I inserted a link to a SlideShare I made for the second evaluation question This is an Emaze I created