Q6- What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

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

During the whole assignment have used technologies in helping construct the product that I have had to learn in order to continue processing the film and as well as the research. 

On the research side we assigned to produce a blog to upload our research on as well as showing the structure and evidence for creating the film. I understand that ‘blogs’ are a ‘new’ and ‘professional’ form of presenting work, and therefore it is very useful to become familiar to blogging. The website http://blogger.com is new to me (I have used twitter but no other blogs before) and so it took me a couple of weeks to become familiar with its functions. I have found the blog very useful in keeping in close contact with my fellow students and my teacher in particular I am able to gain constructive feedback to further improve my ‘posts’. Blogger has definitely been a more interesting way of presenting my work, and I feel it is a more easier way of viewing a student’s research.

Another program that I would need to get to grips with is iMovie, this was the editing software that we were going to be using on that Macs. Before starting the main task we began with a prelimary task to prepare ourselves for the task ahead. After filming a short plot, we imported the footage onto iMovie and tested with the software, understanding how to trim a clip, transitions, adding text onto an image. After numerous hours working on the editing software I felt relatively comfortable with it.

Web 2.0 has become a more attractive way for distributors to market their product, web 2.0 includes facebook, twitter; social networking sites which tend to address audiences between 15-24 year olds, who make up the majority of cinema sales. I now understand how important this method of marketing can be, and because its virtually free to distribute through this form, it allows low budget films such as Shifty, the chance to build an audience/awareness.

In producing our Thriller opening, I have understood that the global social networking site, Facebook is not only used for communicating with friends, but it is also a way of advertising products, through the communication of the social network and with its set up the seller is able to voluntary feedback, almost acting upon Facebook as a prototype for the product to be advertising too until it is finally released publicly. On the knowledge of advertising through Facebook me and my partner have produced a group page on the subject of our film, which we have invited our friends to view and hopefully we can attract people to spread the ‘word’ about our new film.

One of the final areas of the film, was producing a soundtrack to support our thriller opening. Along with the help of a fellow student in the class, who is well experienced on using a software called Logic Pro on the Apple Macs.Although I was only working from the background of his expertise, I now feel confident enough to work on Logic Pro even if I decide to do the video brief next year. We are very grateful that Will Jones could give us a help in hand for this area and we feel that the music track suits the chosen genre well and should enhance the suspense of our movie.

As extra production for the film and in order to help market the product, I produced a website design on photoshop in the style of how a film’s website might appear online. Although I am quite familiar with photoshop already, I am always learning new methods and functions to use and whilst it was a relatively simple finding, I learnt how to make a layer transparent providing a neater layout to view the page.