AS Media Evaluation - Question 6 What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

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

The first thing that I learnt from the process of constructing this media product is the methods it takes in order to create special effects in the production. For example in our production company name ‘Dark Orbs Productions’ we decided to have mystical looking orbs rotation with the camera angle creating a pan and zoom effect over the top of it. This required the use of After Effects; to begin with a set of masks and adjustment layers had to be added to the production, this was done by locating all necessary files from both the internet and programme’s built into After Effects. Using spherical effects and feathering the images used were able to fit the orbed shape that we wanted to acquire.  Next setting the motion of the orbs and position of the camera, the effect that the orbs were spinning and the orb in the background was coming into focus.

During the product a scene in which the protagonist was in focus of the screen and a zombie was slowly coming into focus in the background was needed. Adding a depth of field to the product gave it a realistic effect that can be seen in horror movies across the zombie genre. It was done by first adding a mask over the protagonist character and then adding a fast blur over the rest of the clip. The blur was put on a timer so that the depth of field would change, and as the clip went on the protagonist went more out of focus and the zombie came into focus.

Also with editing the film I learnt that to give the overall product a more realistic feel, colour correction needed to be applied in order to add extra gloss to the clip. This was done by going into the effects tool bar adding fast colour corrector to the clips. From this tool we were able to change the colours of all of the clips to a blue/grey colour to create the atmosphere that the production took place in a cold environment. The next effect that was used was the motion paths of certain clips, for example in the scene where the protagonist is walking and zombies can be seen in the background, a slow screen size increase was used to focus in on the zombies to add a more serious tension to the product.

Another effect that was included in the product was the use of title sequences with entrance paths. We added an eerie and scary entrance path for all of the titles included in the product in order to fit with genre conventions. These effects in technology are helpful to the product as I learnt that through the use of these effects it keeps the product interesting, if the titles had been static and unchanging the audience’s attentions would not have been grabbed as well.

Exporting the video was another thing I learnt about the technologies used to construct the product. Exporting is what gets the clip into film format so it can be uploaded onto social media sites such as YouTube so they can be viewed by the world. When exporting, certain criteria needed to be met before it can work; we tried multiply times to export on MPEG2 but the format refused to upload. So we decided that if used the ‘Match sequence settings’ option and then exported the product onto memory sticks that had higher memories. So the next time we decide to create and upload a product we will use ‘Match sequence settings’ and export it to memory sticks in the future.

After exporting the video onto memory sticks the next step was to upload it to YouTube and embed it onto Blogger. This was done through logging into the YouTube account and clicking the upload button, the clip then has to render and finally upload, the problem that we found with this is that the product needs to have a small capacity (Mb) so that the up loader doesn’t crash half way though. After the YouTube section was complete embedding the file onto Blogger was needed. Using the insert video option we can now embed the product directly from YouTube and onto our blogs so that it can be viewed and evaluated.

 The handheld camera was used to capture the entirety of the product. We learnt that they are highly sensitive when it comes to zooming and tracking. In the first few tries of tracking our protagonist in the product the camera would often shudder and the shot wouldn’t work out. This was due to the stand that the camera was on being lifted up leaving no control over the cameras movement with it being up high. So the way we got around this difficulty was to simply take the camera off of the stand and slowly step with the person being filmed to imitate the motion of the track.