February feedback

Your web-log looks good and now needs completing.  Ensure that creative technologies have been used to present your evaluation.

Complete the evaluation fully

Put the preliminary task and your production as last posts then the questions

Add any extra elements to the research and planning.

Set targets for what you need to do over half-term to fully complete the coursework

Evaluation Question 6

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

Hardware 

To start with we used a Mac Book pro to develop our productions and store all the data from our recordings on here. This is because people see Mac Books as being better as your standard PC so I wanted to know why.
The main reasons that we used these expensive pieces of hardware is because they aesthetically look nice so people naturally know the quality that the apple products possess so people want to learn how to use them for any future function.
They are so much more quicker at loading files that you have already saved to certain pieces of software on the piece of technology. The different software that we needed in order to edit different clips together etc. needed this type of hardware because they would load the content more efficiently nearly instantly sometimes. As well as this the software on the Macs offer a lot more options on how you can chop and change certain things, so even though some things are in different places to the PC's its because they have probably moved in order to add something new into the software.
With a Mac it is so much easier to do certain tasks at the same time because of the screen being so big and broad you can fit loads of different screens on one, this means you can check different actions that happen on different pieces of software that you can check.  With these different functions and option that it offers you it means that you can try a load of different things with the software and have a mess around with a lot more different actions that you can command it to do.

Software 

After Effects 

We used this piece of software for the opening of our film in order to create the tile sequence with our production name and title of the film.  This meant that we needed to learn how to use the software as it requires you to open up your own template and size of how big you want the title at the start. As you can see the screen is blank when you open it and requires you to set your own timeline of what will happen on the screen and when. We learnt the different ways of being able to add affects onto the title by watching certain youtube videos that really did come in handy at stages where we needed it to, this meant we do our title in half the time than what it would of took us to figure out how to use it ourselves. After watching the videos and using a good two hour period of time during lesson we decided what our title would look like and how we wanted it to be set up.
We decided that our title should break out into little pieces and then come back as one with a little flash to enhance the text from the dark background. This to the left is where the title breaks off but like I said before we needed a little flash on the screen so that it would be visible.

We then had to import our title into our main task which was the opening sequence to our film ans that is exactly what we did.This was also the name of the productions fro the film and this was meant to be at the start of the film.

Premiere 

This was the other piece of software that we used in order to put all the shots together and edit bits out whilst adding ones in. Firstly we would take all the shots on the camera that we used to record the shots and then we needed to plug in the memory card into the back of the Macs and then save all the recordings onto the Mac so that we could import them onto this piece of software. After we had done this we could now start changing the different shots and add affects onto them all. We would set all the shots apart from one another on our own timeline that we made on premiere pro, then we would edit them so that we had the same shot but from various angles and shot types so that it looked like a cinematic film production and looked very professional.
The timeline also helped when we needed to overlay audio sounds such as when the character is in a dream and he hears voices, as well as this we also added in background noise so the sound of movement was apparent to give off that dream/imaginary feeling

Coursework feedback

Research and Planning - 11

The research and planning is partially incomplete, but much of the work that is complete is detailed and focussed. There is excellent work into similar products, showing a real understanding of the task. However there is no attempt to look into potential target audiences. The organisation of actors, locations etc is also lacking, but there is a proficient storyboard. Overall there is a good level of care and presentation of the work that is there, but this blog is let down by the lack of audience research and organisation of the shoot.  

Main Task – 38

There is evidence of a reasonably proficient ability to produce material appropriate for the target audience and task. The titles follow conventions, but the editing shows limited only skill in the ability to build up meaningful sequences that convey meaning to the audience. There is a reasonably wide variety if shots and framing. Some shots don’t work, including the shot of a phone that has a reflection across it. At times it looks too much like a trailer as the narrative is not entirely clear. There is limited content and it’s questionable whether the ‘dream’ works. However the camera work is controlled and the sound is well devised, building up tension across the piece.