"What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?’
In this task we used many different forms of technology and learnt skills about each one to increase our understanding of how to use certain techniques to improve our production overall.
The first piece of technology we used was the Internet; we used the Internet for the majority of this production, as we needed it for all of our research via safari. We used the Internet for websites such as blogger slide share etc and therefore without the Internet none of this production could be possible. As we have used the Internet many times before we didn’t have that many limitations using it or difficulties. The only problem that may have occurred is if safari was slow or crashed.
Slideshare is the next form of technology that we used; we needed this to convert our word documents so that they were visible to those viewing our blogs. Slideshare was very useful and extremely convenient to use so that the presentation of our blogs was professional, easy to read but also different/unique compared to just simply typing out our responses on the blog. There were some problems with slideshare for example some of our work wouldn’t upload on slideshare and this made it difficult for us to produce it onto the blogs before the deadline.
To conduct our surveys at the beginning of our research and planning we used google forums, this was quick and easy as the layout was simple to follow. We only used it once throughout our production, however, we are confident to use it again as it was quick to use and gave clear responses so we could do many things with the results. The only problem was that unlike other survey websites e.g. survey monkey, google forums doesn’t produce charts at the end to show the results in the form of charts and graphs. However, we made our own so we overcame this problem.
Clip converter is another form of technology that we used, we used this for our music e.g. the dark knight music. We used this to get music from Youtube and then used clip converted to convert the music into a MOV file that we could upload to imovie. Yet again, clip converter is very simple and easy to use so there were little difficulties, we didn’t use it that often but when we did we found it easy to use.
Two of our evaluation questions are in the style of powtoon’s so we had to become familiar with the site in order to do our evaluation effectively. Powtoon can be confusing to use at first but when you get the hang of it, it makes work very easy and looks very creative and unique. Powtoon is a more creative and fun version of a standard power point and it shows we can use other platforms of technology.
We used a camera to film all of our footage for the prelimary task and our actual film. We also used it take our pictures for a storyboard. We learnt to smoothly film camera movements such as zoom in and outs. Problems we faced were not being able to get the right angles and things like using sd cards and card readers. Also because we did not use a tripod all our filming was handheld causing some unnecessary movement.
We used a website called blogspot to upload all of our coursework to document it. Blogspot was really helpful as we could upload all our videos and word documents straight onto it the only problems we faced were that sometimes the internet was very slow and crashed.
Imovie was what we used to edit all of our footage, our prelimary and to make our documentary and answer evaluation questions one and two. We learnt lots on imovie such as how to edit clips down, add transitions and non-diegetic audio. When we edited our prelimary that was when we learnt how to edit it so that was our opportunity to explore imovie. Problems we faced with imovie were that it took a while to upload our footage and there was sometimes a delay in uploading audio on top.
make our title sequence we used live type. This is a new piece of software you can use to make titles and texts. We were very new to live-type and therefore needed lots of help from our teacher with getting started. Once we got started and downloaded our font off the Internet, using live-type was pretty straightforward. We simply would type in our text, add the font and add our transitions and movement. Problems we faced were getting started and sorting our fonts out but other than that it was fine.
To write our script we used the programme Celtx a programme that specialises in script writing. It was extremely useful as it structured the script perfectly and benefited our needs. It was straightforward and easy to use, especially due to the fact that one member of our group had used it before. This ensured that difficulties were kept to a minimum and we used it to the best of our ability.
