Evaluation: What have you learned from technologies in the construction of your product?
RESEARCH
When our genre had been identified, we decided to do large amounts of research to find out what we had to about the codes and conventions. We used Youtube initially to look at the trailers and openings of the films of our genre. We also looked through the International Movie Database (IMDB) for facts and figures about the movie and the success rate because we wanted to include conventions that were going to make us the most profit. These helped aid the construction of our product because we were able to find the things that were typical of our genre and what we wanted to include in our own opening.
The use of Survey Monkey also helped us during this stage because we were able to construct our own questionnaire and send it out to people to fill in. We were able to include a variety of types of questions both open and closed with different options that they could press. By doing this we were able to conduct thorough research into our genre and audience to get a clear picture of who they were and what were there expectations of the film. The website also produced graphs from the closed questions which we were able to analyse and find out what were the most popular things and what were not so popular. This allowed us to create an effective opening because we knew what our audience wanted and what they were expecting, we were able to mould our idea around these conventions and wholly appeal to them.
PLANNING
Our planning was all conducted on a software called Celtx. Celtx allowed us to plan our script, storyboard, character profiles and shooting schedule. As this was all in one place, it was very useful to use and look back on. We initially had created our script on Celtx, it allowed us to use different things in our script such as the use of dialogue, voice-over and a description of the setting. This made our script more efficient and we were easily able to differentiate between different parts of our script.
The storyboard that we created was using pictures that we had taken rather than drawing it ourselves. This was a creative use of technology because we did not expect to be doing this. It was also easy to update and transfer different photos when changes had to be made rather than having to re-draw. On celtx we were able to choose form a variety of shots which ones we would use and when, which enabled us to be more organised when it came to filming because we knew how to position the camera etc.
The shooting schedule that we created was also allowing us to be more organised because were able to choose which days everybody was free to film and which times, we also chose what scenes we were going to film and allowed for extra filming days if necessary.
The final use for Celtx was the creation of character profiles. We were able to create profiles for the characters that were in our opening. We provided a more in depth analysis of them and the software had already built in heading such as name, age, likes and dislikes to be able to really understand who the character is. We were also able to give the profile to the person playing Chloe who was not in our group so they understood the character and was able to portray her effectively.
Overall, Celtx aided in the construction of our final product by allowing us to plan and organise effectively. If we did not plan as much as we did then we may have had to re film numerous times therefore it saved us time because we knew what we were doing on each day and what we were filming and how we would film it etc.
PRODUCTION
During the production stages, we used a tripod and DSLR camera to film. We used a Nikon D3100 camera which is a standard DSLR camera. The difference of quality from the digital cameras we had used in our preliminary task to these cameras was evident. This aided in our construction because it ensured that it was the best quality filming we could have gotten which allowed us to convey the message of our introduction effectively. We were able to zoom in with the camera easily and zoom out as well as focus easily and when we wanted to. By using a good quality camera, we were able to create a realsitic picture of our film and create verisimilitude. We also used a tripod throughout filming to ensure that the shots that we were creating were able. These was particularly effective doing pans which we used quite a few times in our final product. However, some times we did not use the tripod on purpose to get the effect of handheld camera.
POST-PRODUCTION
During, the post-production stage, we mainly used the software iMovie to edit the introduction to the film. We had already learnt some editing techniques when we created our preliminary task however these were not sufficient enough to create an effective introduction. We had to develop our skills further by adding music, voice-over and transitions as well as editing effectively to create verisimilitude.The most important thing was editing our shots together properly because if we did not do this then our opening would not look effective. iMovie helped us to create realism in our opening and make it look realistic. We used a youtube to mp3 converter to get our music for our opening, it was a quick and simple way of putting music onto out opening.
BLOGGER
Finally, we used blogger to display everything that we have created and found out about or genre and what we would include our opening. We altered the layout of our blog to make it look more nicer and when creating posts I had to learn how to embed things using HTML.
