Evaluation Question 6: What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product? IntroductionI have used a range of technologies throughout my AS course, both with the product itself and my blog. These have helped during the process of production, making the production period efficient and well-documented. CameraFor our preliminary task, we used one of the standard video cameras available from school. This produced footage that was of poor quality and we did not want this to be the case with our final production. To make sure the quality of our product is as high as it can be, we used a Canon 600D DSLR camera to film all our shots. This also meant we could use techniques such as focus pulls, as the 600D has a manual focus. The camera stores all the footage on an SD card, making it very easy to transfer our work to the computer for editing.

Serif MoviePlus X5Post production of our film was an extremely important aspect of the overall production, and was the most time consuming part of creating our product. Editing our film allowed us to set the pace and overall feel of the production, as well as adding a soundtrack and titles. Because we had used this software to edit our preliminary task and our still shots task, we knew it well and were able to therefore start editing our final production as soon as we had the footage. An advantage of this was that we could edit our film whilst we were still shooting some scenes, meaning if we needed extra or different shots we could quickly do this. Overall this technology was reasonably good, as it was very easy to add clips and sounds to the video track, and we could easily and efficiently edit our film. It also allowed us to put on-screen titles into our film, which is an integral part of an opening sequence. I would have preferred using even better software such as Adobe Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier Pro, as these would have let us be more creative with video effects and titles, however these are very expensive and the software available to us for free at school was suitable for this project.

Sound Sound is a very important part of a film, and so we spent a lot of time trying to decide what kind of soundtrack and sound effects were right for our production. We experimented with different genres of music, and in the end decided that Beethovens Moonlight Sonata was perfect for our opening sequence, as it fits well with the genre and treatment of the film. Using classical music by composers such as Beethoven is also ideal as the music is old enough to be copyright-free, meaning we can use it in our film without breaking any copyright laws. We found that using classical music such as this sounded much more professional and was more appropriate than the free soundtracks we found on websites such as SoundBible. BloggerBlogger has helped a lot during the course, as it has allowed me to gather all the aspects of the research, planning and production of my product in one place. It is very easy to navigate and writing blog posts is straightforward. I found the add video/picture tool very useful as it meant that I could add more information to expand on what i had written in my post. In the beginning of the process, I used blogger to document my research into opening sequences and shots/mise-en-scene/sound etc. This allowed me to easily identify the points that make a good opening sequence, and to find out what doesnt so I dont make the same mistakes. I could also track my progress on Blogger through my preliminary task and my still shots task, among other things. This was very useful as I could easily look back at what needed to be improved for the final task. Blogger was a useful technology as it helped me organise my research and track my progress.

IMDb, YouTube, Art of the Title and Movieclips.comThese websites helped me a lot during the research process for my opening sequence. I used IMBd to research films similar to ours, for example Snatch, Layer Cake and the Transporter series. This allowed me to make decisions on how we would appeal to our audience and what genre our film should be, based on the films I found on the website. I used the other three websites to research opening sequences so that I could get a good idea of what ours should be like. Movieclips.com helped me when researching elements of films such as shots and editing in the very early stages of the course. I was able to use YouTube to look at work that past students had done, and some of these helped greatly in deciding what shots and angles to include in our opening sequence. I was also able to view past evaluation responses and this gave me many ideas of how to answer the 7 questions. When researching what to include in our opening sequence Art of the Title enabled me to look at how professional productions formatted their opening sequence, and this greatly influenced our decisions on where to place our titles and what sound track to use.