EVALUATION ACTIVITY 6 - Vianca

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

Throughout the production process we used a variety of different types of technologies.

The equipment we used included: 

- Canon DSL 650 D

-Small and Large Tripods and Dolly

- iMac

- Mic 

- Flipcam

- Lights (and with Filter)

The softwares we used were: 

- Final Cut Pro 

- Blogger 

Canon DSL 650 D 

Pros:

• 18 Megapixels allowed High Quality visuals.
• Main equipment used to capture opening thriller film.
• Taught beforehand so quite simple to construct, in terms of white balance and which buttons to press to video.
• Lens allowed focus for greater definition .
• The range of lighting it offered was very useful.

Cons: 

• Battery life was an issue for us since we ran out of battery near the end of shooting, however we recharged it quickly.
• The menu on the camera were initially slightly confusing to comprehend, but eventually got used to it.
• The mic on the camera was quite weak, although we used a small boom mic to help us.

Conclusion: 

Using this camera, I learnt a lot of things such as how to hold it in a tripod, enhance lighting, white balance and filming with it in general. The process of learning how to use it was very interesting. It was a great experience since I had never used a Canon to video something before.

iMac

Pros: 

• Used in 2 production processes - pre and post production.
• Used to edit final product.
• Used for research.
• Auto-saved everything.

Cons:

• Occasionally the Macs crashed and froze, however I think it was the softwares itself that froze - to solve this issue we patiently waited or just logged onto a new Mac.

Conclusion: 

The iMac was one of the most vital equipment in the process of pre-production and post production. I learnt many things such as the new softwares, e.g Final Cut Pro X and Blogger, I was able to use and using a Mac in general (like scrolling the mouse up would scroll the screen down?!).

Mic

Pros:

• Enhanced our thriller by blocking out most background noise and focusing on our character's dialogues.
• Professional mic.
• Easy to attach on and remove from camera.

Cons:

• Didn't block out ALL background noise, especially in the interrogation scene of our thriller opening - to overcome this we muted the whole footage and added non-diegetic sound, this shot (GIF).

Conclusion: 

The mic was pretty new to our year so we all were excited to use it. I learnt how to attach it onto the Canon and slightly alter the sound it takes in.

Final Cut Pro X

Pros: 

• Used to edit any footages that were to be put onto YouTube for our blog - e.g. interviews, focus groups interviews and our thriller! 
• Simple concept, in terms of cutting and editing a single footage.
• Worked well on Macs.

Cons: 

• Sometimes froze when added too many footages 
• Takes a long time to render.
• Quite difficult to cut to the exact spot you want to cut to - to solve this issue I zoomed closer into a single footage and cut to the spot I needed to.

Conclusion: 

Final Cut Pro X was what we used to edit our final thriller opening on. Therefore, it was important everyone knew how to use it, such as how to cut, add music, add transitions and text onto our final piece. I learnt how to piece things together from scratch (the visuals), adding sound and adding text. Since we always filmed a little after a shot, it made it more simple to cut what we exactly needed. In order to add sound, we recorded our protagonist breathing and replayed it over and over in a low volume. The non-diegetic sound, such as the echoey harp-sort-of sound, was added straight from Final Cut Pro which was very useful because it added to the intensity and anticipation of our thriller. Finally, I learnt how to add text/credit throughout our thriller by using the on the side.

Blogger 

Pros: 

• Used in all 3 production processes
• Easy to blog on.
• Able to alter time and date to have an organised group navigation bar.
• Able to upload things from a variety of websites, such as YouTube, Prezi and Soundcloud.
• Proof of work the group and I has done individually.

Cons: 

• The images sometimes don't lay where I want them to be - however, I attempt to place it elsewhere where it would look just as presentable.
• Having to embed codes is quite long - but, I began to get used to it.

Conclusion: 

Blogger has been exciting to keep up a blog on because I had only been introduced to it this year. It is very fun to blog on but I had also been educated on many things such as embedding prezis and other HTMLs. I feel that without our blog, and the other websites we had access to, we would not have been able to create a good final product. This is because our blog was used to plan and research - where we were able to have in-depth understanding of what a thriller exactly is and conventions of them so our thriller was somewhat similar to a real one.