Evaluation Task 6 - What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

While in the process of creating our media product we used many different technologies that each had advantages and disadvantages. However, throughout the process of creating our film I learned more and more about using and how the different technologies work.

We used the editing software Final Cut Pro on the mac desktop computers. I had only ever used this editing software twice before, which was on our preliminary task and in the previous year, and so there was lots I was able to learn through using it more and more. This allowed me to get familiar with this style of software and improve my editing techniques. This software saved automatically which a huge advantage as the software we had previously used kept crashing which meant we would have lost a lot of the progress we had made on the film.




 YouTube is a website that allowed us to upload our videos onto the internet and we could share the video on different sites such as Facebook, twitter, and blogger. We uploaded both the draft and the final film to YouTube and then this was much simpler and easier to share on to our blog. Another benefit is that YouTube is free and you can upload as much as you want. It is also quick and easy to do. I learned how to upload videos to YouTube and how to get the videos from YouTube onto our blog. YouTube is a benefit to us as it is not only simple and quick to use but also our target audience for the teen angst genre are very familiar to YouTube and often use it to watch videos and listen to music so uploading our film to YouTube would promote our film as they could see it online.

Gmail is an email system that requires a Google account but is accessible via the internet and mobile phones. This easy accessibility allowed me to email myself photos that I had to upload onto my blog and to contact others in my group and teachers at school when I had queries about what I need to do or what we are doing next. I learnt about how easily accessible and easy Gmail is to use.

Blogger also requires a Google account and is also easily accessible and easy to use via a computer or phone. I kept all of my notes and ideas together via blogger and it also helped me to monitor my own progress with evaluations and posting ideas and research from other teen angst films. I also posted my first draft of the film on blogger which allowed me to get feedback from other members of the class and then use this progress to improve the film. I could also post any ideas that I had but decided not to use in the the final media product. I learnt how to use blogger and the importance of keeping research and ideas noted and all together and that monitoring personal progress is also hugely important and can help with producing the best film possible. This benefited my film as I was able to use blogger to generate ideas and research, share them with others, get feedback and improve my film accordingly which allowed the best possible outcome of my media product.

We used a piece of equipment that was a tripod on wheels called a dolly. This allowed us to place the camera on the dolly and get a smooth shot when filming a tracking shot. However the dolly only worked effectively on smooth ground and the footage would shake when on rougher ground. We could take the wheels off and use it just as a tripod when filming a shot that didn't require the camera to move at all. This benefited our film as we could get good shots at the best quality we could. In the process of filming I learnt how to use the tripod properly.

The camera itself was a HD video recorder which allowed us to capture the footage in the best quality possible and this made the overall film quality better. Making the film quality the best we could would suit the genre as the target audience use modern technologies that have the options to have HD on and so lots of teenagers in today's world use HD whenever they can. Having the film in HD would appeal to the target audience more than if it wasn't in HD. Also the camera was small, light and wireless. This made it much easier to film in places around the school and outside of school. A disadvantage to this was that the camera had quite a short battery life and needed to be charged frequently.

 Using my phone allowed me to communicate with others in my group via Facebook during the planning process of creating our film. I also used my phone (YouTube and the internet) for researching about other teen angst films and the conventions they have. This was helpful as I know how to use my phone quickly and effectively and so it was easy to do the research for my own film.

Photoshop was used in our group to create the production logo 'Maximum Productions' and to create the title of our film 'Madison'. Photoshop is available to us on many computers throughout the school and so was helpful as we could access it easily in order to keep improve the ideas we had formed for the title and production company logo. I have used Photoshop before in previous years and so was quite familiar with how it works. However, helping to create the title improved my knowledge of Photoshop further and so I learned more about it which I can use if ever I use it again. This benefited our film as we were able to produce good quality titles that looked more than suitable for our film. Titles are a big conventions of any film and can help show the audience which genre the film is from the start. However a disadvantage is that Photoshop can be quite slow due to the system of the computers that it is installed on. It can crash a lot which means we had to save frequently and slowed the overall progress of the film.

We used a sound recorder in order to record our voices for the voice over for our film and for Evaluation task 3. It allowed us to record our voice in a high quality which, again, improved the quality of the film when we added in the voice over to our film. Voice overs are a key convention of the teen angst genre and helps the audience to understand the film and to empathise with the characters. Using the sound recorder allowed me to understand how to use it and what environment is needed in order to get the highest quality sound possible. A major disadvantage was that people who were also in the room with us when recording our voices had to be silent and not make any noise at all otherwise the recorder would pick up these sounds as well as our voices and so would ruin the quality of the recording.




The Internet was a key component in every part of making our film. In helped us complete research for our own film as we could search up other films that have been made that we wanted to use as a guide and take key aspects from it and use in our own. It also helped us in the planning of our film as we could communicate with the others in our group and organise our time effectively. During planning, the internet also helped us to further our ideas that we had formed and do further research. Finally in the making of our film the internet was used to find appropriate music for the teen angst genre that we would use. The internet is easily accessible as I can access it on my phone, laptop, computer or tablet. This meant that I could do research etc anywhere and at anytime so this was very useful. However it can be slow on any device and the internet on a phone is only available sometimes

Freeplay music was one website that was particularly useful while making our film opening. It allowed us to search for copyright free music that would be appropriate to use. We could access it form any computer and so looking for the right song did not take long. During our film we use two tracks that are taken from Freeplay music and it was important that we got this right as music can help to set the genre of the film and the mood. Before this task nobody in the group knew about this website and how it worked, so all of the group learned about how the website works and how to get music from the website onto the editing software and so into the film.

Powerpoint was used to present our initial ideas to the rest of the class, it was useful because this enabled us to get feedback and so improve our ideas and therefore the film. Powerpoint was used as everyone in the group knew how to use it already and so it could be used effectively to show our ideas in a clear but well presented way.