How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stages?

Without the use of technologies…

• My project would simply not have been possible. Technologies have allowed our group to be very creative.

• We have used a range of open source software's as well as digital equipment.

• Technologies have allowed us to create broadcast quality texts.

While planning and researching, here are some of the programs we’ve used for our short film

Blogger• Using Blogger has been essential for updating progress for our

film. I’ve made sure that I blog every step, from writing the script up to post production in the editing suite. I’ve also included our shooting schedule, storyboard and the weekends we have been shooting. Blogger has been extremely useful in order to keep up to date and see how far we’ve come since the beginning of making our short film.

• Researching short films that have a similar genre and story have given us a much clearer idea about how we want our story and characters to be constructed. This was a very reliable piece of technology to use because of the comments received on their short films. I noticed a lot of positive and negative feedback mostly on their beginning and endings. When I started writing the script I made sure that I took these criticisms and made sure not to put them in our film. What I learnt a lot from YouTube was the audience’ feedback to how they felt towards characters. We wanted to make sure that our central character (Blake) was a character that the audience cared and sympathised towards.

EquipmentOur equipment has been the most important factor towards the visuals, sound and lighting of our film. We used the Canon 600D which gives us 1080p video at 24fps (frames per second). We also used a 50mm fixed prime lens with a 1.8 aperture. This gives the film a cinematic look that we wanted to achieve so that we give justice to the film. As we had quite a few scenes with dialog in our film we wanted clean crisp sound. We used the zoom video recorder and a RODE boom microphone. We also wanted to be able to rough edit the clips without having to put all of the audio in first, so we used a RODE video microphone on camera for added quality in the rough cut.

More Equipment• A very important factor in our film was to have a naturalistic look,

this was created by the lights that we used. We used two Zyon Soft Boxes that we used to add light into the shot, and we also used diffusers on the lights to be able to create a soft feel. Using a spider steady cam has been a major part of our film showing our central characters emotions. Tracking shots are a trademark in our film, investing in a steady cam has been a brilliant decision. A standard tripod has also come in handy for many close ups that we’ve used.

Editing

• To edit our film we’re using Premier Pro. This is an advanced piece of editing and assembly program. Once we had finished our shoots, we would bring all of our sounds and video footage into the edit suite and “batch digitise”, we would then begin to place the scenes footage into the breakdown of the scenes without worrying about continuity or match on action. Once this was done for all of the remaining scenes we began the rough edit. Finally after the sound edit we colour corrected all of the clips and grade them and export the final video.