evaluation question 6

1. What have u learnt about technologies from
the process of constructing this product?

2. This coursework taught me a lot about technology and how different programmes
work and their charasteristics. I picked up many skills such as making a short film on
Final Cut Pro, how to edit titles with motions on Motion, how to film correctly with
cameras and tripods and how to make my own song/soundtrack on Logic Pro.
Blogger was the base website for our coursework. All the work we did, including the
final film opening went up on Blogger because that is how our teachers marked it. This
technology allowed me to achieve a tidy, labelled and organised coursework. It helped
me build my work and include all the details needed. Initially, I wasn’t able to use
Blogger and was new to the website but as I practiced more and more I picked u a few
skills. It has differnt really useful features. In blogger we can embed videos, write
notes, make posts, make links and we can even import videos, images and sounds. The
embed feature I think was one of the most useful features Blogger has due to how i
can share my work that i did on other websites such as Prezi, Slideshare YouTube
videos and Powtoon, therefore i can do my work on different websites but then share
all of them in one. It makes everything way easier and convenient because everyone
can just click on the embedded post and a new tab will open which will make them
view it. In addition, the fact that I can change the date of a post to move it around is an
advantage for me due to how there will be a much clearer order of the steps i took to
create my whole courseowork. I learnt how to used Blogger fully just after one month
of using it because I think it is an easy and straight forward website to use.

3. Final Cut Pro was fundamental for editing our film opening. This programme is known
and used to edit videos and make short/long films and helped me achieve my 2 minute
film opening with titles, logo and sound. When i was first introduced to the programme
I found it hard to understand and use due to the diffferent tools and feautures it has.
The easiest thing to do was importing and exporting the videos but the hardest part
was getting the black fade and inserting the titles from Motion. Importing all the scenes
we filmed took quite a long time because we had over 100 clips which needed to be
imported onto Final Cut. However, the fact that we could put all of them into one folder
(for example all the scenes of the locations went in the ‘location’ folder) made
everything a lot easier and saved me a lot of time due to how organised it was and we
only needed to click on one folder to view all the clips we wanted to edit. We chose to
follow a specific narrative therefore the scenes had to be in a specific order. We
decided that we will start off with the locations and then alter betweenthe actress and
actor to emphasise the contast between them. Getting the black fade into the
beginning and end of the film opening was hard because we had no idea how to do it,
which mad us Google it. We then succedeed and got the black fade effect. Importing
the sounds was quite easy as it was an MP3 file and we only clicked on ‘import audio’.
Importing the titles was quite difficult as we firt made them on Motion. That is why we
had to Google it and learnt how to do it. It took me qute some time to learn how to
huse Final Cut Pro properly (about 2 months) because there are so many features.

4. We had other problems such as the scenes that kept freezing as soon as we played them.
Solving that issue took us a week because we had to get all the clips and move them onto the
desktop and start editing all over again. However, it taught me even more about the
programme because if next year while doing my Media A2 coursework something similar
happens, I will be able to deal with it quickly and effectively.
Logic Pro was one of the most challenging programmes i’ve come across so far. This is because i
have never used something similar and I am not familiar with composing any type of music or
sound. With the support of the music department we learnt how to compose a soundtrack
with different instruments. There were so many insturments I did not even know about such as
the Synthesizers and using Logic Pro not only taught me how to use the programme but also
about music and instruments. I learnt how to put music loops and special effects to each sound
which made it unique for my film opening. The special effects allowed me to almost replicate
the song ‘Radioactive’ by Imagine Dragons which is the song that I was inspired by. The fact
that we could import our video was really useful because that way we could see the exact
timing of each scene and use that to be as precised as possible with the music. Precision was a
must due to how we want to show contrast between the two characters and the scene changes
every 3 to 5 seconds from character to character. That means that the music also had to
change mood every to 5 seconds and the having the video right there on top of the sceen
playing each time we composed our soundtrack helped us get the timings right

5. We’ve had issues with exporting th sound due to how the video got saved with the actual
audio. This lead to the actual Logic Pro file to go issing and we thought we lost our original
sound. However ith the hep of our teacher we saved the audio and exported it to Final Cut
pro to then add it to our final film opening. It took me 2 weeks to finish the soundtrack and
Logic Pro made everything a lot quicker due to how advanced it is.
Motion was a really useful programme to make the titles for our film because we had over
100 fonts to choose from. At first, like the other programmes, it was hard to use and I took 2
days to get my head around it. It did not take us too long to make the title due to how it is
roughly 3 to 4 lines. However we tok our time and tried different types of fonts and
behaviours. The programme is called Motion probably because of its behaviours (motions).
That was the main reason we chose it: we wanted our titles to appear and dissapear with a
motion and have an unique font that matched our genre (romance). We wanted it to be
elegant and we achieved everything thanks to Motion. The challenges were exporting the
titles onto Final Cut Pro because we could not move them but then we solves the problem
and getting the writing to motve a certain way. Sometimes the motion caused the title to tilt
or rotate automatically which affected the making of the titles due to how it took time to
adjust each of word. The final product turned out really good and of a good quality. Now i
know how to edit text and add motions, including exporting it to Final Cut Pro which again,
will help me with my coursework next year with A2.

6. Cameras contributed to the process of constructing our media product. Without cameras we
wouldn’t be able to film scenes professionally and the shots wouldn’t be as steady. Tripods
were needed to get the best out of each shot due to how they hold the camera still. During
the coursework I learnt how to hold a steady shot and do pannings. There were some
challenges that I had to overcome for example the memory card kept running out of space
and in order for me to film the rest I ad to delete all the other scenes. It was safe because i
saved all the scenes on the computer before hand. The camera allowed me to film clean
scenes throughout the whole coursework.
All these technologies allowed me to construct my media product and were all useful and
convenient.