6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Throughout the process of creating my media product I gained the ability to use many different technologies. The main editing software we used to edit our film opening was Adobe Premiere. It enabled us cut certain bits from our film that we didn't want, some shots were 20 seconds long and therefore needed cutting down to get the section of the clip that we wanted. We also added effects such as fading out and creating quick flashes to help deliver a desired effect to the audience. We could also take the audio from certain clips, this was good for when we recorded the voice over of the child collector as we recorded it on the camera so we didn't want the actual image of the recording, only the sound. We could also add titles to the film with specified sizes, colours and fonts depending on what kind of mood we  wanted to create. I've learnt that Premiere is a good editing software to use when trying to enhance amateur films and make them look professional, even though it took a bit of getting used to. Using the Apple Mac sometimes proved difficult as its different from normal computers so it took a bit of getting used to. This probably slowed us down at the beginning of the editing process.
We used mini HD cameras to film our horror opening. We sometimes had issues with the battery in the camera, we found that half way through filming the camera would go off because we were unable to charge it before filming as we always filmed straight after school as this was the only time me and my group had available. Being the camerawoman for some of the shots, I found the control for the zoom zoomed in really fast with only the slightest touch, making it difficult to do zoom in shots. To keep the camera steady we used a tripod, this enabled us to make fluent pans of our subjects and kept the camera still whilst filming at various angles so that our film was more professional. This experience has also helped me learn what types of shots are appropriate depending on what is happening in the film such as using different angles to try a portray a certain feeling. For example, a low angle shot would show power etc. We also learnt that that not using the tripod and doing hand held shots can also be effective in a horror to signify the panic of the victim.
We experimented using a green screen but found that it didn't really work for us, we got a shot of the mask against the green screen and made the background black, we were going to put this onto the title of the film. Instead we looked on YouTube for dripping blood on green screens. When we found one that we liked we used 'Keepvid' to save and use images from YouTube.
We used 'Incompetech' to get music for our film, this website was helpful for thinking about backing tracks. It helped us search for the perfect, un-copyrighted track for our horror film and taught us that it is important for the sound to be right to create the right mood for your film, for example we wanted slow, disturbing music to reflect the nature of the antagonist and to create suspense. It also helped us with its defined searches, it enabled to find specific tracks that linked in with the theme of the opening sequence.
To get other sound effects such as the screams and the electricity noise on our logo we used a website called soundSFX.com where we downloaded our desired effect and cut it down to fit our shot. We thought that the screams on this site didn't sound realistic and our actors didn't want to scream as they weren't comfortable with it.
To make our avatars we used a website called 'www.pickaface.net', we used this to present how our characters would look, this was a website that was easy and simple to use and gave use a relatively wide range of features to portray our characters as accurately as possible on this kind of site.
We used the blog site www.blogger.co.uk where we put all of our research and ideas on to. We used it as a base for the project where we could keep track of what we have done and what we needed to do. There were a few issues with this site as its difficult to put images such as screenshots on to your work.