Evaluation part 7 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

For the production of our media product, we used a range of hardware and software so that we can successfully create an opening sequence. I will be talking about how this software and hardware was useful or not to me.

Pre-Production

One of the first things I did for pre-production of our product was to gain inspiration for our British Social Realism (BSR) was by watching over BSR films on DVD. This was useful to me because we could see other takes on British Social Realist films and gain a broader understanding of it's values and techniques. I could use these techniques and input them in my own product to better the quality and make a good media product for my audience to enjoy. These DVD's were very high quality and allowed me to pay attention to very minute details that may have been too subtle to have seen on other platforms. These details consisted of condoms lying on the floor, alcohol bottles in the very back of the shot and drug abuse syringes scattered across tables. I used this to include an alcohol bottle in the very back of some of our shots to show the audience what kind of lifestyle the protagonist lived so they could gain a better understanding. However there were some drawbacks to using DVD's such as how fragile the discs are. One of my DVD's was scratched and it stopped the entire film from being seen but i progressed past it by buying another from the internet as they are usually very cheap, especially if the film has been out for a long time. I make the judgement that DVDs were more useful than they werent because it allowed to give me insight on how a British Social Realism film should look.

The Mac computers that were provided to us in school were difficult to manage with, having never personally used a Mac computer before. It was awkward to work off of the school Macs because sometimes it would be suspicious and crash which made me realise it wasn't as reliable as a home PC. Although the Macs did have their benefits because it allowed us to work during school hours to get more work done by the deadline, therefore enhancing the quality of our written work. However I just decided to continue working off of the Macs and i saved my work every few paragraphs to ensure that not too much of my work was lost. Overall, in the beginning the Macs were difficult to adjust to but eventually I learned how to deal with them, they were too useful to be abandoning as they were relatively simple to use.

Software such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint allowed us to plan out our film in the various forms of scripts, call sheets and allowed us to plan every single shot that we planned to use in our product. This allowed us to plan what we were going to do and when so that it didn't come out rushed and in a bad quality. I was even able to post some of the work we did on Powerpoint to my Blogger to increase the value of my Blog.

Production

The camera we used during the production of our media product was inconsistent as the first camera that school provided to us was broken, which we had to swap out. Then the second camera had a unique battery pack which was also broken. Me and my group decided to use our own camera to record until school could provide us with a better new camera. This allowed us to stay on top of our schedule with recording and let us gain feedback on it in time to fix the scenes that had problems in it or could have been shot better, increasing the overall quality of our film.

Whatsapp the mobile app enabled me to communicate with the rest of our group and organise when we would  meet to record for our media product. Because of Whatsapp we were able to meet every single planned day and if one of our cast members couldn't make it we were all notified thanks to the group conversation dedicated the the production of our film.

Another software that we used was OneDrive by Microsoft to store the files about the production of our film to other cast members. We used OneDrive to send these scripts and call sheets between each other to organise the film. It is also very safe and secure so I never needed to worry about losing all my work and having to start over.

The tripod that school provided us with was also useful as we could make sure the camera wouldn't shake when we didn't want it to, making the scenes and shots more aesthetically pleasing. We had a problem where the tripod leg was unbalanced and it threw the shot off so we had to use make-shift tripods to carry on made out of stacks of books and bags.

Post-Production

MP3Unsigned.com provided us with music that we needed to fit in our film, it was especially useful thanks to it's wide variety of music choices that we could have selected. We used MP3 unsigned for music because we were allowed to use signed artists' music so we had to find the alternative, unsigned music artists. We chose rap music because we thought it had strong links to the theme and thought our target audience would personally identify with the music as it had a strong urban feel to it.

Blogger was the most important part of production because it allowed us to do our written work from the ease of home or anywhere I was as long as i had a computer or laptop. It was also a safe storage for all my work to be put so that I never really had to worry about losing my work, other than a few other times. Blogger is simple to use and very aesthetically pleasing making working across it more pleasurable and satisfying. Blogger's wide accessibility thanks to it's HTML coding  makes working across it very flexible and easy as you can have powerpoints on it and pictures, making the blog have a higher quality.

Final Cut Pro was another vital software that we used in production of our film. Final Cut Pro allowed us to edit and cut our film together to make it smooth and crisp. It also allowed us to test different transitions to see which one would work best for our film and change the tints of certain scenes to make it have different connotations, e.g. turning a scene into a blue tint would connote anguish. There was one incident where all of our work got deleted but it allowed us to have a fresh start with editing and let us fix what we couldn't before without having to delete too much.