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

Before this task, I was not very familiar with digital camera, film lighting, the editing software and creating a blog. The blog meant that we had to start posting our thoughts of what we did each week and how we could improve our work. We were also given access other students work so we can read it and know how to improve our own work. We also had to learn how to use websites such as IMDB, YouTube and other official websites for different companies’ website such as Warp website.

 Before this task, I thought The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) was only used for watching film trailers and finding out more about movie plots. During this task, I learnt that IMBD also has content such as details of the film. These details include; the country where the film was made in, release dates and filming locations etc. Other important things you can find on IMDB about a film include box office budget, company credits and technical specs. People can also read about the film review.

I had used a digital camera before to take shots such as zoom in and long shots which was very effective in our task and was used to create tension. However, during the preliminary task I learnt different techniques such as the 180 degree rule which is mostly used during a conversation to create a good film.

A lot of research was needed in this task and all the research had to be done on the Internet. We explored the Internet, for example what the different types of editing techniques were and to watch film trailer on YouTube and other websites.

 We used Google to research conventions such as sound. 





YouTube was very useful in this task. Because it would have been very expensive to buy movies to analyse them, we used YouTube to watch a lot of our film openings.  We had some fair advantages of using YouTube because we had access to films. However, we struggled to find psychological thrillers on YouTube.

 


 

 YouTube to watch movie openings.














After doing our research and storyboard, we were ready to start filming. Because most of us knew very little about camera settings even after the preliminary task, we were lucky that one member in the group knew a lot on how to use the camera. By the second day of filming, we all knew how to use a digital camera. We knew how to use zoom to show emotion and long shot which shows loneliness. 

 

We used a tripod to get steady shots.















Unfortunately, during our second day of filming, we forgot our storyboard in school. We had to recall everything we had on the storyboard and improvise other shots. The filming was not accurate to our storyboard when we came back to school so we just had to edit what we filmed because none of us were willing to go back to the location were our sequence was filmed due to the health and safety measures. 

The film was set in an old and dark warehouse. There were broken glasses everywhere in the building which most of us cut our self from. We had to climb through windows to get into to the building which was a terrifying experience for me.  There was no naturally lighting and we forgot to bring a touch during film. We had to lit up our phones during filming to make the clips brighter. 

The scene where we used phone light to light up the scene.

 






We found the editing process really difficult after all the mix up we had during the filming but after some positive feedback from the teacher, we knew we could get some good scenes out of what we had. We had about four hours long of footage but we had to edit it down to a two minutes sequence. The only thing we had to do was to cropping the different parts we didn’t want. When the scenes we needed were selected, the film became easier to edit.

The film was set in both the present and the past. During editing, we used colour to differentiate the times. The natural film colour was use to represent what was happening in the present and we added black and white to show the past. I also learn how to drag particular clips we needed for editing and cut of the parts that we didn’t want. We used “adjustment button” to adjust the clip and audio (included background soundtracks).  I also learnt to use transitions such as Wipe and Cross dissolve which was also used in our preliminary task. 

                                                               


The difference in time is seen through colour ( past is represented in black and white while present is seen in it's normal colour).








I also learn how to download a free copy right soundtrack from SoundCloud onto iTunes. We did not add any background sounds in our preliminary task.