What Have you Learnt about Technology from the process of Constructing this Product?

Filming and camera equipment

The equipment we took to the location of filming consisted of:

A video camera (which we discovered to be very bad quality)

A large tripod And a glide cam (for the spinning

shot in the trees)

Problems we Faced

Our first shot involved using the glide cam to create a shot through the tree branches spinning. However, when we took it out the bag we discovered that the weights to stop the camera flapping about were missing and the screw that secures the camera to it was also missing. Therefore, we were unable to use this piece of equipment and had to manually spin it in the air with our hand.

Editing

To edit our thriller we used premier pro, I found this quite challenging because although I used this during our preliminary task, it was still relatively new to me and I had forgotten most of what I had learnt before. Charlotte did a lot of the editing, as I had been given the job of director, and I told her what order the clips in and where the titling should go. Charlotte was very good at editing and I was able to learn a lot about Premier Pro from her. For example, she taught me how to slow a clip down, which was important because in that particular shot the camera wasn’t completely steady.

Music and sound

In terms of sound and music, I contributed greatly as I had already had a lot of experience of Mixcraft. Therefore, I was able to use this software to create a piece of music for the victim to be listening to. I was also able to teach Charlotte how to use it, this meant that we worked very well together as a team as she could teach me about editing and I could teach her about sound. We also used Mixcraft to make some background sound effects to create a spooky atmosphere and tension.

Using Mixcraft wasn’t our initial plan however, as we were had asked a friend of ours (who happens to be in a band) if we would be able to use one of his songs, as the band write their own music. At first this was fine and they were happy for us to borrow as it wouldn’t be breaking any copyright regulations. However, due to a sudden surge in popularity of the band, and the new management they were under we were no longer able to use this song. Although the song we had in mind would have fitted perfectly with our thriller and the lyrics would even added some irony and dry humour (fitting with the thriller genre) I’m glad we ended up creating our own as it gave me a greater sense of accomplishment and really helped us to improve our skills and understanding of the software.