Evaluation: Part 6: Technologies

Part 6: Technologies:
What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?:
Through creating this film opening, I have ended up using many different types of technology, most of which I had never used before and therefore gained and built a whole new set of skills. For example, Blogger was a website that I had never used before and was therefore looking forward to getting to use and understand it. Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows users to connect and create an audience through their blog posts. This meant that Blogger was the perfect website to  document our work and process of creating our film opening, which is why we were asked to publish it here. I started off this process never having used Blogger before, and therefore found myself a little confused as I had to come to grips with the website. To help understand the site I played around with the layout of my blog, changing it to a layout I felt was more suited to me. I also added a welcome post to help me understand and practice my blog post writing and creating skills on Blogger. This helped me to gain a better understanding of the site and allowed me to learn how I can edit my posts in different ways: changing positioning of text, underlining and changing fonts, adding in pictures (and other media) and changing the size of them, changing text size and making it bold and italic, changing font colours, adding in links to other websites, adding in bullet points, etc. Gradually, post by post, my understanding of Blogger grew which helped me to make my posts look more interesting, established and professional. This process has therefore allowed me to gain a better understanding of the website and how it works.

Here is a screenshot of the Blogger blog that I have created

I also used YouTube during the course of this project. This wasn't a website that I used too much, however it was needed for uploading videos we had created to document our process in creating and researching our film opening. YouTube was a website that I was familiar with beforehand, however I had never uploaded a video to YouTube before creating this film opening and therefore was using it in a different way and from a new perspective than before which consequently led to me gaining new skills. Videos we uploaded to YouTube included, a video based on different camera/ editing shots (to help us understand these better for when it came to filming), our preliminary opening scene video, our audience focus group questions and answers relating to their feedback on our finished opening scene and our audience focus group questions and answers video relating to what people thought of our initial ideas and conventions they believed to be seen in romance/ drama films. We did occur some problems when trying to upload some of these videos to YouTube, particularly the video on our audience focus group answering our questions relating to feedback on our finished opening scene. When importing this video into YouTube, we initially were importing it as the wrong file, so we had to change this to make it correct. Also, when we then came to uploading this video onto YouTube, the video was stuck on being 0% processed. Therefore we had to re load the page as the processing was stuck and it eventually uploaded itself. This allowed us to learn from our mistakes, meaning that we wouldn't do this next time.

YouTube is a piece of technology that allows smaller institutions such as Warp Films to help establish their institution and build viewers for their films. This follows Chris Anderson's theory of the Long Tail which suggests that  our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. This therefore suggests how independent institutions who create unique films for niche audiences will be more in demand as the theory predicts that
demand for products not available in traditional stores and markets is potentially as big as for those that are. Subsequently showing how with advancing technology, websites such as YouTube, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, allow smaller companies to engage directly with their target audience and build an interaction and interest from consumers. As websites as these and soft such as Final Cut Pro allows a shift from the consumer becoming the prosumer showing how there is a change in the media world from the value chain, where products were only made by large conglomerates such as Time Warner and distributed straight to audiences, to the social network which is a complex system that now allows producers and audience to be mixed.

To present my research, I used Prezi to create presentations to clearly show what I have found. Prezi is a website that I had previously used before this project, however I hadn't used it as much/ in as much detail beforehand. Therefore, this project aloud me to experiment with different presentation templates, adding in new slides and editing the order of the slides, experimenting with the size and font type, etc. It also allowed my work/ research to look aesthetically pleasing and exciting to look at as this is something that it does much better then other presentation devices such as Microsoft Powerpoint.

Here are many screenshots of our editing process, for which we used Final Cut Pro to create. Here you can see how we have edited our clips together in chronological order and overlapped them with non-digetic background music/ a voice over of a sermon.

Here you can see that for this flashback scene I had to add an effect on top of it to make it seem more obvious that it is in fact a flashback. Therefore I added the effect 'Bokeh random' on top of this clip and others to create the sense of a flashback occurring more obvious to the audience.

Here, I edited text over the top of each clip we have included in our opening title sequence. Also, on top of that I edited non-digetic background music, a transition between each individual clip to make the title sequence seem more continuous and our film name right at the beginning of our opening scene.

Here, you can see how we have created a montage section in our opening scene to present Henry quickly reflecting/ flashing back to happier times in his life. This is to present the significance of him and his boyfriends relationship as this occurs just before he recieves his results. To create this, I edited four clips down very small so that they each only showed for about a second. This also has non-digetic background music on top of the footage as well.

Final Cut Pro was one the main pieces of technology that I used and hugely developed my skills on over the course of creating my film opening. This is mainly due to the editing process being very time consuming as it is something that needs a lot of looking over, refining and changing. To begin with, I had no previous experience with using Final Cut Pro and therefore felt a bit overwhelmed when it came to editing our footage, especially as I did the majority of our editing and it is quite a complex editing programme to work with. There are many different sections of Final Cut Pro that I developed knowledge in over the course of the project. Firstly, I learnt how to import footage into Final Cut Pro, and after importing it how you then have to drag over the footage that you want to use into the main section of the programme as this section allows you to edit it. From here I learnt how you crop and split the footage (if needed to), which you do by dragging in whichever side/ part of the footage you want to get rid of. Also, I learnt how to edit the footage together, which you do by putting each clip side by side on the main bar of Final Cut Pro. Here, I organised the order we wanted our footage to be in which I did by dragging/ moving each clip to the correct order. I also worked out how to overlap footage on top of each other and how to import sound into Final Cut Pro (which you do by dragging the sound file from iTunes into the programme) and overlapping it with our clips to allow us to have non digetic back ground music and voice overs. Also, learning how to edit the sound by cropping it and fading it in and out and the beginning  and end to give it a subtle transition into the following sound. Similarly, I learned how to edit the sound from footage, which you have to do by double tapping the footage until a drop down box of just the sound appears and then I edited out the section of sound we didn't want. I also made the sound louder/ quieter in certain clips so that all of the digetic and non digetic sounded at the same amplitude as each other throughout.  I additionally learnt how to add in transitions, we used the 'Fade to colour' transition, which we used multiple times within our opening. With this you pick the transition you want and drag it onto the main section of the programme where you can then change (if you want to) the length of it. It is a similar process when adding in effects on top of footage, which I also learnt to do. Here you pick the effect you want, we went with 'Bokeh random' for our flashback scenes, and you drag the effect onto the video clip you want it to change, where you are then able to edit the intensity of the effect (which I did). I also gained skills on including text and titles. I added a main title at the beginning of the opening scene with our film name (Retribution) on it, which I changed the length, spacing between each letters and transition (out) of. I also added text over the top of our clips in the opening title sequence to include the name of everyone involved in creating our film opening. Here, I worked out how to edit the text by changing the font (which we changed to "Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro') and the colour (changing it to white), positioning (which we made different for each title) and size (changing it to 63). Furthermore, I gained skills on overlapping footage on top of each other. We wanted to have a shot of a couple holding hands over the top of a shot of Henry in the church praying for forgiveness. We made the clip of the hand holding translucent so that you were able to see both clips together. Overall, I would say that Final Cut Pro is the piece of technology that during this experience I gained the most skills from and learnt the most about.

Web 2.0 is another piece of technology that I used when creating our production. Web 2.0 is the name describing World Wide Web sites that emphasise user-generated content and usability and was created by Tim Lee. Therefore, this includes websites such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Google, etc, that I have used through all aspects of creating and researching for our production. As previously mentioned, I already had some knowledge using these websites, however my knowledge widely expanded and grew from this experience, particularly with Blogger. Web 2.0 is now available due to growing rise in new technology as it has majorly expanded from the original Web 1.0 software. Before Web 2.0 e-media pages were created and edited only by specialists and were very costly however because of Web 2.0 it now allows the consumers to become the producers, again becoming prosumers, allowing them to create their own media for a small amount of money as well as what they are producing being available to view worldwide, globally allowing people to become much more aware of what is happening in the world and gaining new skills. Due to this, Web 2.0 largely helps people like us as well as institutions to promote and view their media (films) on websites such as YouTube, therefore allowing media to be available to a wider audience. This allows smaller institutions such as Warp to be promoted easily. Additionally, it allows the audience to be in control of what they watch as they are able to watch what they want, when they want to. Unfortuantly, because of the rise in Web 2.0 and other new technologies such as Netflix and iTunes, people are able to download films easier from home, which subsequently means that cinema ticket sales decrease.

Finally, another piece of technology that I used was the filming equipment, which included a DSLR camera, a tripod and a microphone. I had extremely little experience with all three pieces of technology, therefore I also found this fairly hard to work out how to use initially, although I did eventually come to grips with the technology, and felt that I gained new skills whilst doing so. I learned how to work the camera, establishing what button did what function, eg. play back, record, fast forward, etc. Something that I found problematic when filming our scenes was how the camera often appeared wonky and also wouldn't always focus on what we wanted it to/ went out of focus a lot. However, we learnt to persevere with it until the footage looked how we wanted it to. I also learnt how to do focus pulls with the camera which is a creative camera technique in which you change focus during a shot and usually involves adjusting the focus from one subject to another. As well as learning how to show the depth of field, which is the amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a shot. We also used a microphone to create our opening, which proved slightly problematic. Initially we didn't have a microphone and therefore the sound on our footage sounded grainy and quiet, with lots of background noise. However, when we eventually got one, this very much improved our sound although we did unfortunately still occur some background sound which we later had to try and edit out.  All of this technology is now available to us through a rise in new technology. This rise allows us to use new, high tech equipment that is able to do much more. To conclude, through using this technology I developed camera and sound skills which were very beneficial to me.