EVALUATION: Question Six

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

The technologies required for constructing our Media product were all very new to me, and learning to use them was very exciting. It was a challenge at first to learn about all the new technology, but once we had both mastered it, it was much easier.

The first piece of technology we learnt to use was the use of various websites on the internet. www.blogger.com is the website we used to upload all of our evidence towards the piece. It allows us to keep a record of our progress throughout the whole process.
Social networking sites such as www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com worked as a helpful way to conduct my target audience research and the feedback we did. These were very helpful because it allowed us to reach a larger audience, and also was much quicker than conducting several interviews. It allowed me to exploit web-2 technology with each social networking site.

www.Youtube.com is another very useful website that allowed me to upload all of our video evidence, such as our research on Match-On-Action, or our preliminary task. It is a quick uploading site and was easy to use, as I had encountered it in the past, and meant I didn’t have to learn new methods. Youtube also allowed us to watch video tutorials on how to do makeup for our characters and costume techniques.
www.freeplaymusic.com was the final most useful website we used. It contains a collection of non-copyrighted music that we could peruse and use for our piece. In the end, we settled for a piece called ‘Got The Smarts’ that fit well with our piece and got us good feedback from the audience.

Using the newer technology was more of a challenge. The first thing we had to learn to use was the Panasonic hand camera, which was much like a normal digital video camera. Both my partner and me took turns experimenting with it and the various shot types such as worm’s eye views and bird’s eye views, both of which we used in our final piece. This gave us both a chance to experiment with the technology and really hone our skills before we filmed our final product.
The use of tripods was also important, as it helped steady our shots and give them a more professional shot.

The iMac, with iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GIMP, was another new piece of hardware that we both had to learn. We were given a short tutorial from our teacher, then we were given some time to play around with the technology. iMovie allowed us to slice our clips together, add sound and basically put the whole product together. iDVD then allowed us to burn our piece to our DVD for the examiner.
iTunes and GIMP were two smaller programmes used. iTunes was how we imported our sound to iMovie, and GIMP was how we made our production splash. We uploaded our drawing and coloured it to make it stand out, using GIMP.

We also used a compact digital camera to capture location shots, character costumes, and all sorts of other evidence. This allowed us to capture our evidence.

All of this technology was really fun to learn to use, and using Blogger was a great way to keep track of my progress. Learning all of the new skills were crucial to our success of our movie, and I really enjoyed learning everything.