EVALUATION QUESTION 6 What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product? By Toni Buchholtz
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product? The blog I am presenting my work on is created with the help of Blogger which is a blogging service by Google Inc. I have worked with Blogger before, however never in this detail, so a lot of the features that I used to create my blog were things I had to learn first. It is very easy to create a blog with Blogger as you do not need to learn HTML to start and the steps with which you create your blog are explained when you first enter the dashboard. Sometimes it is hard to find out how you, for example, change the font of your title, but the help provided on the website is very helpful and easy to understand. One negative thing about Blogger is that you cannot insert any other media than YouTube or your own pictures; the rest needs to be put on the blog with a link and a picture only. On this blog I used three other services to present my work; ISSUU, SlideShare and PREZI, none of which I have used before. PREZI is a very universal service. You can insert any kind of media into it and the many layers with which you can create a presentation make every piece you do look professional. I mainly used PREZI for my research and some of the planning. I personally find PREZI a great help for my creativity because I can literally present my work in any way I want. However, creating PREZI presentations is usually time intensive as you have so many designs to choose from and there are so many ways in which you can create your work. This partly hinders the productivity, nevertheless, in the long term, you get a better result for the time spent. ISSUU is a service that you can easily work with. You simply upload your Word Document or Power Point presentation onto the website and it makes it look like a brochure. The only negative point about ISSUU is that it sometimes converts your files incorrectly and they get disorganised so that you need to reload them. Other than that ISSUU is a great and quick way to make your work look more professional. Added to that, it is free of charge. The last service I used to present my work on my blog is SlideShare. It theoretically works the same way as ISSUU except that it is only for Power Point presentations and not for Word Documents. You simply upload your work and it creates a slide show with your work. However, compared to ISUU and PREZI, SlideShare looks the least professional and the least modern. I personally prefer to work with the other two services rather than with SlideShare. Over all I learnt a lot this year about how many ways there are to present your work and how much of a difference a change of font can make. For the camera work we used many different products that I have never worked with before, this being my first year of Media Studies. The school provided us with high quality cameras from LINUX, however those are not comparable to the high tech cameras used on professional sets. Added to that, the cameras are
weak in bad lighting conditions. The tripods we used for the cameras were also provided by the school and were very helpful in preventing “camera shake”. However the quality of some of the tripods was a bit poor and partly hindered effective working, for example when a leg broke. The use of different shots and the whole camera work was completely new to me as well. As the camera woman of our production I worked a lot to generate the atmosphere and the scenery of our film, trying my best to represent the psychological horror through different camera angles and different movement techniques, such as using a track. In our final production we used high angles to represent the victim, Manjana, as vulnerable and unprotected like a child, which is especially obvious to the audience in the final scene when she is lying on the floor open to attack. Elisa on the other hand, who plays the villain, is shown from a low angle, standing above Manjana, enhancing the danger she is representing. Furthermore, we used the track to represent walking or other kinds of movement in our films. The usage of the track was simple, however the possibility of “camera shake” is very high so that you have to work precisely to get the best results. Now that we screened our final production, the use of a crane would have been an advantage for the killing scene and for the shots that represent the video camera inside the building. Overall I learnt a lot more about camera work in the filming industry and how complex the process is. It is totally unlike the common image of a man holding a camera whilst a scene is played out. For our editing process we mainly used the program Final Cut Pro, developed by Apple Inc. that is installed on all of the Media Studies computers in our school. The program is a non-linear video editing software which has been on the market under this name since 1998. As this was my first year as a Media Studies student I have never previously used Final Cut Pro, however it was very easy to learn how to use the program. Looking back at our old films, we could have improved them a lot if we had known how to use the program more effectively as we do now. Overall it definitely made our work a lot easier through the professional looking designs and the easy process of editing. An example of our usage of Final Cut Pro was the use of colour filters from the program that we used in the stalking scenes. Framing elements of Final Cut Pro were used to represent the video camera in the building in the end of our film. Another technical feature that plays a key role in our film, is the music and its editing. The piano tune used as the background music for our final film was composed by Sirin Gerlach. The editing of the piece was later done using a program called Sibelius 7. It enables you, like Final Cut Pro, to edit your music in an easy, fast to learn way and is free of charge. So this is the perfect system for us as a low budget school production. All in all I learnt a lot more about editing in this one year of Media Studies than ever before. The easy to use programs we used for our products helped me to understand the professional way of editing and that it is a necessary production step in every film.