Evaluation Question - 6

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


In order to create our film we used a wide range of facilities and technologies in order to make our film stand out. We used technologies such as Garage Band, Google, IMDB and YouTube, iMovie and LiveType. 
From the beginning we had to adjust to the camera that we were using and have a feel of what it is like to be real film makers. We experienced this by using various equipment such a tripods, camera's and a voice recorder and seeing how they work. 

on the Apple Mac computers, they were various choices of softwares that we could use and we picked and choose which ones were good for each specific element of our film from soundtrack, to editing, to creating the idents. We used LiveType to create our indent and we saw a range of fonts and effects which made our indent look more professional. For instance, our Bricolage indent was created by choosing the moving brick wall and for the Illusion Distribution we wanted to match the background effect to the title and therefore we picked the mist.  iMovie was the main software which we used as we used this to edit our film and this was the software that was mostly used. This application helped us insert soundtracks, edit clips, use transitions, add effects to the title's and others. At first it was hard to get used to all the various different functions of the application but after a while it became second nature. In iMovie we were able to cut fast shots and "splice" them together in order to increase the pace of the opening which therefore increased the tension. 

In order to show our progress along the way, we used Blogger to talk about our struggles and success' along the way and also for our research and planning. On these blogs we also analysed different films based on our specific genre in order to get different ideas on the conventions of the horror genre. 

Other sources we used to look at different horror films, distribution companies and producers, was IMDB, YouTube and Wikipedia. We found IMDB useful as we could compare our film to other Horror films which had succeeded in the market and were able to look at specific directors and there techniques. At the very start of putting our film together, IMDB was useful as we had to see if our name WAXED was already taken or if our ident names were taken by searching it on IMDB. We used YouTube to upload new rough cuts and our final cut to gain feedback from other users and also used it to create a group account. 

With the soundtrack, we knew exactly what we wanted but we found it hard to create the soundtrack that we wanted. Our first try of making the soundtrack was not a success. I tried to use some eerie piano keys but the recorder picked up different sounds. To fix this problem, we used the software Garage Band which worked perfectly and we created the soundtrack we wanted. We were looking to create intertextual references to the Psycho film soundtrack by using high strung note contrasted with low notes. Using Garage Band also allowed us to create sound effects for our film. 

If we were a professional production team we would aim to have more reliable and technological resources such as real musicians and a professional software and editing team. However, seeing as we are an independent production it was not possible or affordable to have these technologies.