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

 Overall making this thriller opening has helped me learn a lot more about different media technologies. If you haven't seen some of my previous posts on my blog I am really confident with editing and I have a paid software which I can use really in depth.

First of all I learned a lot about colour correction in our thriller opening. Before making the thriller opening I was working on a really old editing software called Premiere Pro CS6, after realizing how outdated and how much of a pain it was to colour correct, as I had to open every different clip in Red Giant Magic Bullet Looks. After upgrading to Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2017 I found it so much easier and more effective to edit the thriller on. First of all it has a colour correction add-on in built called Lumetri Colour. This is a side bar on my editing software where I can easily adjust any aspect of the clip with ease. It was so easy to pick up and learn and worked so well for our film. This increased my productivity ten fold.

Another way upgrading my editing software helped me was by having the mask feature built-in. This is where I can mask out an area in the scene and add an effect to it. I used this in the opening scene with Jak typing. I made a mask on the background using the pen tool and then added a camera blur to blur out the background. Learning how to do this made the final film look so much nicer than if I used my older software.

The camera we shot the thriller opening on was the Sony RX100. Learning how to use this camera to its full potential was vital so that the final film would look really good. Luckily this is my personal camera which was great as I knew how to use/utilize it to get the best quality. The the whole thriller opening I used a manual focus which I adjusted myself for every shot. This was good because it didn't take long to adjust the camera however the results were amazing.

Throughout the time filming we learned to mix up the shots and use a variety of pans and camera motions to keep everything interesting. This came to us when we sat down and looked at the footage from our original film idea. Everything was shot really badly and didn't flow the way our new one. Definitely an eye opener when the film we originally thought was going to work ended up not. Now we know whenever doing anything else what to do and what not, such as shots from inside a house of someone outside (old idea), that was one of the shots that definitely didn't look like planned.

During the process of making the thriller opening I learned how to make my own blog. I originally started using Wordpress however I did not like the layout and preferred the look of blogger way more so I changed over early on to save time. This is using blog-spot or blogger. This is a free website that anyone can use to make a blog, like this one which is on blogger right now. At the start it was quite daunting but as I added more posts it became clear how to work everything and make everything look how I want it to. The only thing I don't really like on this website is how the photos have to be set scales (e.g small, medium, large) but that's not a website flaw that's just a personal preference of mine.

During the construction of our thriller opening I have learned about how effective social media is and how it is really useful in promoting and advertising a product to an audience. Making youtube adverts and facebook pages really helps with getting feedback and promoting our film. Uploading to youtube wise I have already been previously making youtube videos here and there so it was really easy for me to do.

Finding music for our thriller opening was really challenging as we needed to find a song which fitted with our thriller opening but was also copyright free. Eventually we came across an artist called Ben Prunty whose work was not copyright free, however I noticed that he posted something on twitter within the past minute so I sent a tweet to him in hope that he was still on twitter and would answer. He did which was amazing saying that we could use his music as long as we credited him and the video was for non-commercial use (making money). I go more in depth on this in on of my earlier posts on my blog.

Using social media to keep in contact was a really good use of technology when making our thriller. Generally we arranged everything that we were doing in class, however it was really good to have a group chat to remind each other about when we were meeting or to share work and discuss ideas. We all heavily use our phones which was useful when we needed a quick response.