Evaluation Question 6 - Learning On Technologies

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

The first and most important technology we were given to use was iMovie. This was introduced to us during the production of our micro dramas. It's used for basic editting for low-budget films - for instance our micro dramas, pre-lim tasks and coursework task. This is one of the main programmes used throughout the production of the coursework task, because without this the shots we got whilst filming would be worthless.

A second and also important resource I used is the IMDb website which I used for research into stats including box office figures of films, and to research into companies that produced films in my genre, and also companies that distributed films.

The technologies that allowed me to share/ embed my media work (filming, podcasts, vodcasts etc), were:

• YouTube - this allowed me to upload the footage, and share with other media students, friends and the youtube community to gain feedback on the film.
• Scribd - this allowed me to upload documents and embed them into my blog.
• DivShare - this gave me the oppurtunity to upload and form of media and post onto my blog for others to listen, hear or read.
• Vimeo - this is a wesbite for the specific purpose of uploading video/ movie files and embedding to share with peers, or for the vimeo community to browse. This is a much more useful technology to use than another video sharing site for instance YouTube, because it allows acess for viewing in school.
• LiveType - livetype was used to create both the company idents. These were the distribution company and the production company. Livetype was potentially the most difficult program to use - at first glance it's fairly confusing, but I fairly quickly got the hang of it and made the company idents.
• Blogger - This is the technology that gave me to share my work to. Anyone can access my blog and add comments to potentially improve work. This is the most used program throughout the media project, as virtually all work done, is recorded via my blog page.

All of these technologies were used via the apple mac computer. However there are several other technologies that were the foundation stones of any practical media work.

First and foremost, we used JVC Handycams to film our project. These are easy-to-use video camcorders, which allowed us to upload straight to a PC after filming. They also used tapes as a pose to SD cards, which is to my personal preferance. We used a range of tri-pods which were used for the majority of shots during filming, due to the fact that the only other shots we could get were POV shots, as other equipment for other shots such as dolly and jib is very expensive and also unpractical for the scale of our film openings.

At the beginning of any form of filming during media lessons, we were still learning the basics of using the equipment/ technologies, however now we're much further on, and the skills that have been learnt now come naturally without thinking, as a pose to the start where they were very difficult, took a long time and were very difficult to get right.