Evaluation - What Have We Learned About New Technologies

During our project we used a variety of new technologies that most of us hadn't used before. For instance, I hadn't ever used Blogger before and had to learn how to make a blog, create posts, insert images, upload videos, etc. which was quite easy once I got to grips with it. However there were many harder things we had to learn about and use such as the camera for filming and iMovie software for editing. We had quite a lot of trouble with our filming and the camera in general as our first shoot would not upload to the iMac's we were using. This required us to re-shoot the entire sequence which turned out to be a blessing as we improved on a lot of our mistakes.

Also during the filming we had multiple problems with lighting. We found it quite difficult during some shots as most of our production was filmed indoors. With normal domestic lighting it became too bright and didn't particularly have the right sort of feel for the horror genre. However, we remedied this by filming at night and having dull lighting so that you could see the action clear enough but still in a suitably creepy environment.

We then had more trouble with the iMac's and iMovie software when uploading due to various hard drives on the computers and network complexities. We saved our work to the wrong drive at first so our first lot of editing was completely lost which again required us to re-import the footage which was quite time consuming and by this stage extremely frustrating. Once the footage was re-imported and saved on the correct drive we then had trouble editing it effectively. Not knowing how to use all of the tools before an introductory session we had which helped us quite a bit to understand and enable us to edit at a higher quality. In the end we did manage to successfully shoot, edit, evaluate and plan our production to a high quality and we are all satisfied with the final product.

Evaluation - How Have We Progressed Since The Preliminary Task?

Since we started our AS Media coursework we have done a lot of work with the camera and practiced an awful lot with how we were going to film our opening sequence. Infact we actually shot an entire practice run of our opening sequence and looked it over to see what shots looked good and what ones didn't. Admittidely it took a lot of time to find the correct shot angles, distance and movement. But in the end it seems to have paid off as our final production has a wide variety of shot types and quite clean movement. For example theres a range of shots such as establishing shots, long shots, low angle, high angle, worms eye, point of view, over the shoulder etc. All of which we've learnt since the preliminary task and aimed to perfect to provide a clear understanding of the characters position within the opening sequence. For instance the vulnerable characters were both mainly filmed from a high angle connoting that they are being looked down upon, made smaller and overall make them seem helpless and alone. Using the techniques we've picked up and learnt we've been able to create an effective opening sequence that fits the specified genre.