Group Q6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this porduct?

We found that several technologies converged in the making of a film.

·      Blog, this a bit like a directors note book, where research imagery, dialogue, notes and personal thoughts as well as early drafts of the scripts, script outline, shooting script and edit notes can be posted in one place.  This allows ease of access for everyone involved in the production, for cross referencing ideas and comparing notes, it also allows for immediate feedback and does away with the need for print outs which can so easily get lost.

·      Youtube, this is an essential tool and is so useful for quickly accessing movie trailers, excerpts from TV episodes, opening sequences for films and commentaries on films. Other useful internet tools are video on demand such as Netflix, where high quality films can be streamed in an instant giving immediate access to a whole range of ideas and inspiration.

·      IMDb, this is a great tool for looking at user ratings, and demographic breakdowns according to age and gender it also gives useful information on the film such as Production Company, director and year of release.

·      Digital cameras, there are so many devices that now capture high quality footage, that is it difficult to choose a format at the lower budget end. We used a good quality DSLR with separate sound, this was very useful as the handling a lightweight camera makes shooting very easy and because it records directly to a memory card there is no loss when capturing the footage into a hard drive, unlike previous generation DV tapes.  It also has instant play back functions which allow you to review captured footage immediately, so discard or keep.

·        Editing software, we used a digital editing software interface. This software is a linear editing interface, which makes it easy to swiftly put together a timeline of sound effects and footage. Typically there is a bin of shots to choose from, from which the editor selects the footage he wants drops it into the timeline and trims to adjust. This footage can then be further treated using contrast, exposure, and colour controls to achieve the desired stylistic effects. Most edit suits have further appearance tweaking controls to further stylise the look footage. In the audio timeline which is directly synced below the movie timeline, one can further add sound effects and the exact points in the timeline that the editor suggests. Once the rough edit is completed, transitions, special effects and titles are added for the final cut. This makes editing so easy in comparison to the cumbersome manual editing of only 20 years ago

Also My questionaire maker which i used online from  http://freeonlinesurveys.com/ helped collect research and feedback and find out our target audience and what they liked about thrillers.This was extremely useful.