Harriet Watson's AS Media

At the start of the year our understanding of media and technology was vague, but since then we have used and experimented with a wide range to stretch our understanding. We have gained ability in areas that will help us in school and later life. Our coursework would be held on Blogger, whenever we did work or coursework preparation it would be put on here, kind of like a notebook/diary, this was the technology we used the most.We have learnt how to use Photoshop in recreating a movie poster at the start of the year, getting used to cutting and replacing images etc, which would help later on in in the project.

Most of the technology we used was in the creation of our 2 minute film opening 'In Another Life'. We used a Nikon D3200 (SLR camera) to film,it had multiple settings to get the best outcome and quality. As we are all quite familiar with photography and camera's, it was lucky we knew which was best for the filming. A Tripod was very helpful as it kept the camera straight and was sturdy, we used the internet to research and learn how to use certain software's, also what we were actually going to do for our film. Once the filming was completed we used a program called Adobe Premier Pro, this would help us edit our film opening by cutting, adding music, rendering it, change the order and actually make it into a film. We went into this software not knowing how to use it, so YouTube was a great help! Natalie did most of the editing, we learnt how to rendered the shots to make them less shaky, cut out certain bits to make them shorter as the opening had to be 2 minutes as we had about 3 minutes of footage in total, we used the black and white effect in 'Emma's' sections to show a dull and sad life in which she lives.The credits were added, this wasn't as difficult because you had to cut the shot and type what you wanted, The music that was added was called 'Story of a Girl (Absolutely)' by Nine Days we also used Premier Pro to do this, we felt this song would fit in well as it is also used in many American teen romance movies. As we know conducted from our research music is very important in a film as it tells the audience what mood to feel in a certain scene. Premier Pro overall was one of the most important technologies we used as it brought together everything which created our coursework.

To create an I-dent which would be our company logo in our opening we used another Adobe software called After Effects, this allowed us to create animation and other special effects for graphic related projects.Once again we had no knowledge on this program but luckily we had an ex- sixth former who also was a media student come and teach us the ropes, this was really helpful as it gave us opportunities to ask questions for later on if we needed to use it later. Prezi was also used to create question 2 and 7 of the evaluation, its a great way to feed information out rather than a word document or power-point. We used YouTube to import our video and then to our blog, its a helpful way to show evidence of movie clips, music and our film opening. We also used YouTube to watch tutorials to help us gain understanding on programs we had never used before. Technology has been a big part of the process on the construction of this product and learning how to use them is very important, we have learnt alot which will be able to help us later on in work or the rest of sixth form.