What have you learnt about technologies during the process of constructing this project?

Evaluation 6

Mobile Phone (iPhone)
-Firstly we used our iPhones and made a joint ios groupchat with our 3 group members. This allowed us to easily communicate our ideas about the film when we are drafting ideas at home when we are not all together. This allowed us to help each other expand on certain points. For example when I was researching music for the opening scene I recorded the sound using a voice memo on the phone and put this into the groupchat. My other group members then gave me there thoughts on the song choices and we decided which would be best suited. This benefitted our film greatly as it allowed us to have a variety of opinion on different soundtracks, opposed to me deciding the song choice on my own. Using this feature taught me how to use voice memos on an iPhone and how to send them to multiple people. We also used the camera feature on our phones to communicate in this way. An example of this is when one of my group members was trying to construct our production company logo and he was looking at different fonts to use. He took a photo using the camera feature and then sent us photos of these different font style and we came to a joint decision on what font would best suit the production company. This helped benefit our production company logo greatly as we found a font that suited our production company very well and this wouldn't have been possible without the use of this technology.

Video Recoding Camera
-This was an essential piece of technology that helped us to produce our film. These cameras were available to access from school and we could book them out and use them in offsite locations such as at home. This was very important because it meant we could conform to stereotypical teen angst locations such as a girly bedroom which we filmed in our film. This was a very easy process due to the very convenient small size of the camera which meant we could easily transport them to various locations. This was also important because it reduced the chance of damage equipment which we had to consider in our risk assessment. Throughout the filming process we learnt how to use the camera in different ways to help achieve different effects. Firstly we learnt about the lighting settings on the camera which allowed us to create the best possible lighting for each shot, high-key lighting was used because its typical of a teen angst film. We also learnt how to take different types of shots with the cameras. For example we wanted to take a high angle shot of our main character Rose and before the process we didn't know how to use a camera to do this. This shot was important because it allowed us to portray Rose in a innocent way that would not have been otherwise achieved. Lastly we learnt the importance of a steady shot which we successfully achieved and made our film as professionally shot as possible, which is important when competing with other similar teen angst films. To assist us with this process we used a tripod, which although not entirely a piece of technology itself, it was an essential part of ensuring we took steady shots.

Websites
-Blogger was the first site that was an essential part of the process throughout this project. This is because it acted as an online diary that helped us track and keep all of our research and planning safe and recorded. The importance of this is that if we made these notes and records on paper it could be easily lost, however Blogger ensured the safety of our work. This benefitted the making of our film greatly because blogger is very easily accessible on a wide range of devices from desktops to iPads so it meant our research and planning was safe and ready to be used whenever we needed it for our film. When working on blogger I learnt lots of new skills such as how to customise a blog, add gifs, photos and videos, make draft posts instead of publishing unfinished work and changing the order of different posts. These skills allowed me to present my research and planning in a clear and presentable way. Further to this blogger allowed our teachers to view our work whenever convenient to them and allowed them to leave comments on our research and planning and these improvements benefitted our film.

-General browsing of the internet allowed me to access different sites that helped me research about conventions of similar teen angst films. For example it allowed us to access various websites that had teen angst films and showed photos or information about these films such as Netflix for viewing the films and wikipedia for information. This was very important because this greatly influenced the planning of our own film as we assessed what worked well and what didn't which allowed us to choose what teen angst conventions to conform to or not. During this process Iearnt lots about how to use these different sites for particular services like streaming videos. I also learnt web browsing functions such as holding ctrl and F to search for certain words when looking to identify certain things on a web page. These functions really helped benefit my research for the planning of our own film.

-Dropbox was another important website that we used throughout the process of the construction of our product. Dropbox is an online server that allows you to save documents and pictures on your account and access them wherever you are. This was very important throughout the planning and research process because it allowed me to save work and research that I had done in school and work on it during my free time at home. This helped benefit our film because having the access to the work at home allowed me to meet certain deadlines that I may not have otherwise met and this would have delayed the production of our film. Before the process I didn't know how this service functioned so using it taught me how to make an account, save work onto the server and access the information on other devices.

- Youtube was an important asset because it enabled us to upload our videos such as our preliminary task and our draft of our film, as well as being free to use. This made it easy to post onto places like our blogs which saved us a lot of time, allowing us time to work on other areas of our film. During this process I learnt how to upload videos onto YouTube and how to upload these videos from YouTube onto my blog. YouTube greatly benefitted our project as it allowed us to improve our blogs for research and planning and we directly used this research and planning for the making of our film.

- Freeplaymusic was the last website that we used to help us during the process of constructing our projects. We used this website to find different soundtracks that we could use for our film opening. The website has a wide range of music that is copyright free and also appropriate for the style of teen angst film. This website allowed us to find 3 different soundtracks that were appropriate for of teen angst genre and this really benefited our project as it helped set the mood which is necessary for a film opening. This process taught me how to use this website, download music from it and transfer this music onto our editing software. We also used another piece of technology which was a memory stick to help us transfer the music. We had to transfer the music found on a desktop onto a mac and the only way to so was by using a memory stick. Doing this taught me how to transfer files onto a memory stick and then download then onto another device.

Apple Mac
-The Apple Mac was an essential piece of technology for putting our film together. On the mac we used different apps like final cut pro for editing and using it to share our film in the form on an mp4. The macs provided much better quality than we would have on the normal school computers so this greatly benefited from us using them. The reason for this is that the macs allowed us to perform actions such as improving lighting and changing the size of our shots so that we are best for a teen angst. Using the Apple Mac taught me how to use this Apple software that I didn't know how to use before.

Powerpoint and Interactive Whiteboard
-For our initial ideas we had to carry out a pitch for our class mates and teacher. To do this we used Powerpoint to put all our ideas together onto a document. This allowed us to put together our thoughts about our plots, characters, music etc. in a visual way for our class. Through doing this I learnt how to make a powerpoint document and insert music and pictures onto it. We also used an interactive whiteboard to display what we made on our powerpoint. This allowed us to clearly show our class and teacher our ideas that would otherwise have been difficult on a small computer screen. Due to this we got lots of feedback on how to improve our initial ideas which greatly befitted our film. I learnt how to effectively use an interactive whiteboard effectively through this process.

Social Media
Social Media played a huge role in our research and planning process. We firstly used a site called Instagram to find out about what types of conventions that our target audience. I used the # to search for teen angst in the hashtag. This showed us pictures of what people had posted with the hashtag of 'teen angst' such as of the main character from mean girls. From this we learnt about what conventions from teen angst our demographic likes and we decided from this what conventions of teen angst to conform to. This taught me how to use hashtags to search for different posts relating to a topic like teen angst. We also used social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to post our draft of our film onto. We choose these sites because they have the highest traffic of 12-18 year old females compared to other sites. This allowed us to get feedback on our film opening from a suitable demographic and this gave us ideas on what to improve. Through this process I learnt about how to upload videos onto social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Final cut pro
Final cut pro was the software that we used on the apple macs to edit our film opening. Final cut was very useful for this process as it allowed us to put transitions, music, layering, fast-forwards, titles, etc. Putting all of these different edits onto our footage taught me how to edit in this way using Final Cut pro. The most important edit that we used on our film was the music and layering of different sounds together and played over our footage. For example at one point we had to fade our music down to a low volume while a diegetic speech played of two characters talking. The music set different moods that we needed for different scenes and made it fit well into a teen angst film.

Photoshop
I used Photoshop several times throughout the process of constructing this project and aspects would not have been possible otherwise. Firstly Photoshop was very useful when it came to making our production company logo. This is because we had to put a piece of text that we made along with our logo. Having used Photoshop in the past the interface was simple and easy to use as all the tools are very clear. However I learnt about however to carry out different actions that I hadn't used before such as the transform tool as this allowed us to change the size of our text and also rotate it so it fitted perfectly. Further to this I also used Photoshop to construct my teen angst mood board. This involved importing images found online onto Photoshop and putting them all into one big image. This meant I had to used features that I didn't know before such as the cropping tool and changing the size of an image without affecting the quality of the image. Before the process I did not have this in depth knowledge about Photoshop that I now know so doing this has taught me a lot.