(2) How does your media product represent particular social groups?
(3) What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
(4&5) Who would be the audience for your media? & How do you attract/address your audience?
(6) What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?
Before I started this year in media I knew nothing about how to operate a camera and relating editing tools, however now that I've made a thriller opening and edited it I have a much greater knowledge surrounding using these sorts of technology. Below is the equipment we used from camera to editing machine.
Camera - The camera was very easy to use as the only process we needed to use on the camera was the record and pause button, this made it very easy for us as this is knowledge that we already knew. I have learnt a variety of different camera techniques from movements to shot distances and I used a good range of them throughout the film. With the assistance from the tripod I was able to keep the camera steady and utilize this to also get a variety of angles. I also learnt how to use a zoom shot as you can see at the end of our film. However despite this there was limitations to using this camera, the major one being that we could only record any audio that was close to the camera, this meant that we had to plan our scene where there is a line of speech in accordingly to this, limiting what we could do.
Tripod - The tripod was relatively easy to use and all we needed to do with it was put it up and then put the camera on it. We used the tripod for nearly all of our shots (apart from ones where we needed the camera on or close to the ground), we done this as it keeps the camera steady for you and makes the shot seem more professional. It also had different heights which we found helpful as some shots needed to be taken at a higher viewpoint than others. The overall advantages of using a tripod was that it made it a lot easier to do most of our shots as it allowed the camera to be kept steady and fixed throughout the shot, it also allowed us to adjust the heights making it easier to do a variety of different angles throughout our film. On the other hand though there was one limitation to using the tripod and this was that we couldn't move the camera when it was on the tripod mid shot, for example we couldn't do a tracking shot as the tripod doesn't have wheels or good mobility.
Blogger - Before this year I didn't even know blogger existed, but now however I have made my own blog and can use most of what it offers its user. We used blogger to present all of our work out and to get it across. I've learnt all different things from blogger like how to create a blog and then to maintain one by adding picture and videos along with text. Learning these skills have been vital throughout my course and I'm glad that I have picked them up along the way. Overall I found blogger really easy to use, the layout was simple and easy to understand (as you can see in the image below), along with the creation of each page. Everything was very clear. Because of this reason blogger had a variety of advantages in aiding me to make this blog, where it was easily understandable I could use it with ease and as a result of this it allowed me to get my work across with no struggles. The only disadvantage that I can find with blogger is the availability of the different font styles that can be used and it is very restrictive, this had resulted in my blog being mainly just the one font, with little if any variation in the text.
YouTube - I had experience with YouTube before I started this course and uploading videos was just a basic skill I already knew, however then getting a video from YouTube onto Blogger was a skill that I needed to learn and which I have learnt. I now have both my preliminary task and final film opening onto my blog that was from YouTube. I also learned how to import videos from YouTube to use as examples as you can see on my homepage. YouTube is a very easy service to use and only requires a log in before you can upload any video, it was very easy to upload my two videos and I done it with ease, the layout of the upload screen was also very easy to understand as you can see below.
Adobe Premier Pro CS6 - Before this year, I had no knowledge of this program let alone editing, so the process of editing this film was a barrier for me but also a very educational learning curve. During the editing of this film I have learnt a variety of factors such as the basics of just import video clips and putting them onto the timeline, but also more advanced techniques like colour correction which I found very difficult to grasp off the bat, but before long I learnt how to utilize it. Another technique I learned was how to apply some special effects such as the one we used in our film the 'Film Dissolve'. This was very easy to grasp and only needed us to drag and drop the special effect onto the timeline and shot we wanted it on.
Google - We used Google throughout making the film and blog as we needed to do research and Google provided us with the search engine we needed to aid us. We also used it to get more information on the examples we have used throughout the blog. Despite this though we didn't learn anything new as we all had the background knowledge already. Google has always been easy to use as it is just a website where you type in what you want to search and nothing more (as you can see in the picture below). Google has a variety of advantages, with not only being easy to use, it also gives you thousands of potential pages to choose from relating to what you have searched, giving the user a variation of pages to choose from. However this also was a limitation for my group as the variety of different pages that we could choose from became confusing and we didn't know what ones were reliable as opposed to the ones that aren't.
Microsoft Office - We used this mainly with our blog but it aided us in the production of our film as well. We made a power point that helped us with the health and safety issues surrounding our film and also helped us with our target audience. We all had Microsoft office knowledge beforehand though so we didn't learn anything new. Where we had this previous knowledge surrounding the software it was pretty easy to use as we all knew the layouts and how to present our work using the variety of programs the software offers (such as a document using word and presentations on power point). The advantages of Microsoft office is that it does have a variety of different document styles that we can utilize throughout aiding both our film and blog. Microsoft had no limitations that preventing us from doing our project. As you can see below we had a variety of Microsoft Office programs to choose from to aid us in the development of our production.
Wikipedia - We used Wikipedia to help us get the information we needed regarding our distribution company, and it provided us with a lot of information. Wikipedia always has been a site that is easy to use, with the main use of navigation being the search bar, it also contains a range of hyperlinks relating to similar topics making it easier to find the information that we was searching for, in this case distribution companies (as seen in the picture below). This also being Wikipedia's only major advantage that it is easy to use and has relating items already linked. On the other hand, Wikipedia has a major disadvantage being that anyone can edit its contents so it is not always reliable data/information but can be more guess work by an outside individual.
(7) Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
This is our prelim task and looking back at it now from our final film I think we have learnt a lot. Especially within the camerawork and editing aspects of making films. One of the things we have learnt is that we needed to take more then one take of each shot, this gives us a selection so we can choose the best ones for each shot taken. However we didn't do this during our prelim task and ended up using shots we didn't necessarily like.
Another skill we learnt in our progression is the use of framing in our shots, as you can see in the top picture which is taken from our prelim task our framing is off. As you can see we have a bin on the right hand side that we don't really want in our shot. However in the bottom shot of our final edited film, we made sure that everything in shot was supposed to be there, we used the environment to make it seem more like an office which is what we wanted it to look like.
In our prelim task our match on actions weren't very continuous as what they could be, however within our final film we made sure that our match on actions went all good and looked continuous, an example of this is in our lift scene and looked very smooth and continuous. However an example of our prelim one of Ben sitting down didn't look as good as what it could have been.
Throughout our final film we also made sure that our shot-reverse-shot kept to the 180 degree rule, even though we also done this right in our prelim task, it came naturally this time while filming. It helped us save time when filming and also made it look more professional as we made sure we had enough room for the camera to abide by the rule in each shot before shooting it. Below is our shot-reverse-shot screenshot in our final edit.
We also learnt a variety of new editing techniques, as before with our prelim task all we needed to know was very basic editing skills, such as cutting down a shot and dragging it onto the timeline. However with our final film, we used more advanced techniques such as colour correction and the use of dissolves and titles. Below is one of our colour correction shots that we edited.
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