Evaluation Question 6

Q6) What have you learnt about technologies and the process of constructing this product?

To create our finished media product we went through a number of steps including research, production and editing, each of these steps required the use of a variety of different media technology.

Pre-production:

Our first step was to research opening sequences, finding out what they are all about and how we could create one of our own. We used many different technologies to present what we had learnt about opening sequences and how our idea’s for the opening sequence were progressing. 

An example of this is our use of the website ‘Survey Monkey’, this website allowed us to create a personalised questionnaire that we put up on our blog to get feedback from the public as to what their film preferences were, which helped us to decide which film genre we should do for our Opening Sequence. 

We presented our research findings in many ways, this included writing up blog posts and incorporating screen shots, photographs, or YouTube video’s to illustrate our text. For example we did this in Task 2 - ‘The Opening Sequence’ and in Task 14 - ‘Production Company Logo’. We also used the website Prezi to present our research, for example in Task 4 - ‘Inspiration from Real Media’ , this meant we could present our findings in a creative and interactive way.

It was important that we made our pre-production information come to life, as otherwise the blog would be very boring, one of the ways in which we made it more exciting was by creating video’s using the iMovie software then uploading them to YouTube. For example, we did this in Task 6 - ’25 Word Pitch’, we created a BBC news headline report in which Elena read out our 25 word pitch. Using editing skills to make this short clip also helped us later on when were were editing our final piece. 

Before production started we also had to make a production company logo, for this we used a software called ‘Motion 5’ as we wanted a moving logo rather than a still image. We found this software incredibly challenging to use and we had to watch a number of youtube tutorials to understand how it works. Eventually we got the hang of it and were able to produce our ‘Seeing Double Media’ logo. We edited it so that each word appeared evenly spaced out, and one-by-one so that our title was bold and eye-catching. One of the key things we wanted to represent in our logo were the words ‘Seeing double’ so to do this we used an image of digitally altered clouds which we put in a zoom effect on this portrayed the idea of ‘Seeing Double’ as the effect of the clouds made them double over each other.

Production:

We used the Cannon EOS 700D camera to film our opening sequence, this camera has excellent HD quality (18MP) which gave our opening sequence a very professional look. The camera was versatile which was important for us as we needed it to be suitable for both the investigation/crime scene shots and for the party shots. It was good that the camera was hand held as we had a number of shots where we needed the camera to move i.e a panning shot of the photo frames, a tracking shot of the detectives feet walking through the house and a zoom-in shot of the dead teenager in the crime scene. However we did need some shots where the camera had to be held still, for example the close up shot of the detective stepping out of the car, and the over-the-shoulder shot of the teenage girl on her phone. For these shots we used a tripod called the Velbon df-51, this tripod has the ability to rotate 170° and extend in height up to 152cm, which meant we could create some very dynamic shots and we were not restricted in the slightest. We decided to film our opening sequence over the period of just one day, however this became a slight problem as we were worried the battery of our camera would run out, however in the end we just about managed to film all the shot we needed in time which was a relief! 

Post- Production (Editing):

To edit our Opening sequence we used Final Cut Pro which is an editing software programme on the Apple Mac Computer we were using. We uploaded all of our filming footage onto Final Cut Pro and from here were were able to create our Opening sequence by: trimming clips, transitioning them, adding audio, adjusting their speed, adding titles/sub-titles and adding effects etc. At first we did find the editing process quite challenging as we were all fluent in using iMovie, and Final Cut Pro was quite different, however it did not take us long to get to grips with the software and we soon began to realise its potential over iMovie in producing our Opening Sequence. For example we found that Final Cut Pro was much more advanced in editing our audio, and it also had a much wider variety of effects and transitions which were vital for our opening sequence. Finally we had to upload our finished Opening Sequence onto YouTube, which was fairly easy, we had to make sure the video was on ‘Public” mode so that it was available for anyone to watch, we also had to agree to a third-party copyright policy as we had used the song ‘Bon Iver - Woods’ in our opening sequence