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

I have learnt about a few different types of technology throughout my experience shooting, editing and publishing my media product. These include;

 I used blogger to keep record of all the research I did into the thriller genre and the planning before the shoot. I also posted various techniques I learnt about shooting as well, including the 180degree rule and the various different shots and what to do to enhance my thriller. This was useful as it was effectively a virtual folder I could go back and look at it whenever it was necessary. I also learnt about using iMovie, as a piece of technology I never knew existed till about four months ago I learnt all the editing tools and effects to make sure that my media product was up to the standard that I wanted. Youtube and Facebook were also technologies I learnt about throughout my media production. These were both vital in making sure that my product got across to my target audience. We could then use the comments as the audience feedback too. Then iDVD was used to publish my media product. I learnt some things about shooting as well, like how to use the camera and tripod in order to get the most effective shots to get the desired effect.

Lighting was a problem that we overcame throughout our shoot, we were filming inside an abandoned airbase so it was extremely dark, using iMovie I tweaked with the footage in order to give the illusion of there being more light than we actually had.

iMovie was the technology I learnt the most about. I learnt about making the footage look effective when they are edited together using certain transitions when they were needed, speeding up clips to give the effect of time flying much quicker. I also learnt  about putting non diegetic sounds into our media production and how to cut the sound up so that it fitted in almost seamlessly with my media product. I developed my skills with iMovie specifically with the use of clever transitions. I found myself using a range of various shot transitions as my skills on iMovie developed in order to make my footage more effective. These include shooting my own transitions of black footage as I could not have the fade to black come in quickly enough to give the required effect that I wanted with my footage and media production.

We found when we got back from our shoot that we may not have had enough footage to make a good media product, however using iMovie I made shorter clips out of bits of footage that would have otherwise been useless in order to make my media product much more effective.

(iMovie open, and the iMovie and iDVD icons on the toolbar)