Firstly, the use of blogs has been crucial in all areas of planning, research and evaluation as it has helped my group to organize schedules around our timetables and keep track of when each individual activity is happening - an incredibly important point as we found during filming, as sometimes we were unable to film on a scheduled day. It also served as a place to show what we had found during our research, which was helpful as we constantly referred back to our findings so our final product was kept as close to the conventions of a typical thriller as possible.
Equally helpfully, the blogs are interactive and can be used by anyone, so audiences outside of our project can look at our research and comment on it, telling us how we can improve or what they enjoyed about it - which is a two-way community, enabling us to get answers and feedback and reply to these comments quickly and easily. In addition to this, lots of information can be hosted in many different forms - for example, in files embedded from Youtube; audio podcasts; etc - which makes the blog look more professional and interactive.
The user of different recording devices has also helped us immensely. We used digital cameras to take and compare pictures of actors and possible locations that we could film our product in; we also used them to see how different angles would look and affect out film, which saved us time as we didn't have to experiment while filming. We used miniature 'DV' cameras to record our video footage of the prelim task, a rough copy of our film and the final product, which was used in conjuncture with a fresh DV tape that our films were recorded on. We could rewind and watch footage directly after filming it to make sure it looked okay, and if not we could film those sections again instantly. Both cameras used USB cables to connect and exchange information with computers, that was then uploaded to our blogs, and both devices taught us about framing skills and how we should position the camera to achieve the perfect shot or angle, which we also used a tripod for.
As well as this, we used microphones that were installed in the computer monitors to record some sound bytes that we couldn't record through the camera. This was extremely helpful as it meant that we were able to get the sense of a phone conversation actually happening, so the audience could tell what was going on and it seemed realistic at the same time. If we had used the camera to film it we would have had to shoot images as well, which wouldn't have worked for the storyboard that we had set out.
One of the most important technologies used in this entire project was the editing software iMovie. Because of it, we were able to edit all out clips into one singular, coherent media product, take out any scenes we didn't want or need and give the film and overall professional look. We were able to use it to directly cut video clips so we only used footage that we wanted instead of having lots of rough cuts and clips, and we were able to use lots of different clips that we had shot, instead of one continual shot that had been filmed in one sitting.
iMovie also allowed us to import clips and videos that had been downloaded from other websites and then edit them to our own needs - for example, the MyTherapy clip was edited from a much longer presentation, and using the editing software we cut it down to something that we could use.
Additionally, we could insert titles and transitions so our film wasn't constantly and awkwardly changing scene without a smooth transition. We used fade-ins, which we thought were the smoothest and most professional-looking, and created titles that were typical of the thriller genre to make it look like an actual film had been produced.
Finally, we were able to export our finished product and compress it into a single file that could then be uploaded or sent to another website so that we could attempt to reach our target audience; we used this to gain criticisms and comments on our finished product which we can use to later improve on our film.
Overall, each technology has been indispensible to this project, and without them we would have been unable to research, plan and make our media product as thoroughly as we have been able to.
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