EVALUATION: Question 6

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


Many of the technologies required for this project were new to me, and so learning about them was a fun experience. Although it was somewhat challenging, once Katie and I had mastered the new technology things went a lot smoother.



The first few pieces of technology we used were some websites I already had a pretty solid understanding of. www.blogger.com is the website we used to upload all our evidence onto, as well as recording our progress. Social networking sites such as www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com were also extremely useful, as they meant we could reach a wider audience with our research, feedback and advertising. We exploited Web-2 technology often in this respect. In conjunction with this, I often used the site www.slideshare.com to upload power points onto my blog as evidence of my research and/or work. 

Another useful website would www.youtube.com, which allowed me to upload any and all video evidence, such as our preliminary task, or work on match-on-action. I have encountered the website before, and knew it to be a quick uploading site. We were also able to use it for some of our research, such as make-up tips for our zombies.
www.freeplaymusic.com was an extremely useful site to use. It contains a vast number of non-copyrighted music which we could listen to and ultimately use for our piece.  In the end, decided on piece of music titled ‘Got The Smarts’ which we though fit well with our piece and served to get us good feedback from our audience.

The newer technology was the harder part for me, as I had to adapt and learn how to use it. The first thing we had to learn to circumnavigate was the Panasonic hand camera which is like a digital home video camera. Katie and I took turns in using it, shooting different shots, such as worms-eye and birds-eye shots, both of which we used in our final piece. We both had ample chance to hone our skills with this technology before we got onto filming our final product.
The use of Tripods was also important, as it gave us a steady shot, making it ultimately more professional looking.

Aside from the video-camera, the next most important piece of hardware we had to learn to navigate was the iMac which included iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GIMP. Our teacher gave us a short tutorial, and we were left ample opportunity to experiment. iMove gave is the chance to splice clips together, add sound and pretty much construct the whole of our piece. We then used iDVD to burn our finished product to a disc for the examiner. We used iTunes and GIMP less, iTunes we used to import our audio files to iMovie, and GIMP we used to colour our production splash once we had uploaded it to the iMac.

We used my compact digital camera to take location shots, character shots, costume, make-up and stills from our filming process, and when we directed our actors. It helped us capture evidence to upload to our blogs, to shot exactly who did what when.

I found learning the new technologies a fun and enlightening experience. Some things, such as blogger, I found useful in keeping track, and I found working with the cameras immensely fun. All of the technologies we used were crucial in the production of our final product, and I think the enjoyment I got from all that I ascertained  was an added bonus.