During the process of planning and making our film i have learnt how different technologies can help to distribute a film, get feedback, or help with planning of the film. I have used the following technologies along the process of planning and making the film:
PROS:
IMDB was useful for research into media distributors and types of films. I used this when deciding what actors I would like to have in the film, I was able to see what other movies they had done, and the genre that these movies were, and what their plot line was. I was also able to get photos of the actors in those particular films.
IMDB also helped to decide what media distributor we would have to distribute our film, on the warp films IMDB page it shows a list of all the films they have made and what genre they are, and so it was easy for me to look at these factors and decide how good they would be as a distributor for our film.
I also used it when looking at all genres of movies, I went on the IMDB page of each movie and looked at what actors were in it, and who distributed and funded each movie, to get an insight to which actors are associated with a certain genre or a certain production company, and what kind of movies other production companies were known for making.
CONS: On some pages, whether they be for films, actors or production companies, information is missed out, i found this out when i had made a list of films that i wanted to research, and so i looked on each films page and most of them had everything i wanted to know, but a few pages missed out the budget that the film had and how much money it made when it was released to cinema and on DVD. This information had been given on every one of the other films.
Similarly to my previous point of information being missed out, i have noticed that the most popular films and most famous actors have the most information, this might sound reasonable as it is clear that not a lot of people are going to be bothered about films that have been a flop and actors that haven't done many films, but i think that the information is still important and should be put up, but i found that the pages aren't very detailed at all and it would have been useful to know statistics and quotes and general information even though the popularity is low.
PROS:
I have used Google for a lot of things during the making of the blog and the film process, I have used it to get lists of good horror movies and horror movie directors and production companies.
Google images has also been a great help for getting horror related images for mood boards and the blog.
We also used a google search to make sure that there wasn't a film company that already existed under the name of RedXProductions, we originally wanted to have our production name as Red Productions but after a google search we found out that Red Productions was already a film production company, but RedXProductions didn't exist so we settled on that.
CONS:
Google doesn't always have the picture that you want, it is good with simple searches such as 'a tree' but other searches such as 'someone being dragged into a mirror' doesn't get you what you're looking for, but that is partly because it is very unlikely for there to be a picture of that occurrence, but there still might have been a screenshot from a horror movie with that situation. But the pictures that came up weren't even related to what I wanted in terms of picture content, it gave one picture of a mirror and the rest were of people, such as David Beckham and Gordon Brown.
On YouTube our group made an account specially dedicated to the Media project, on this account we added every video that we made, altogether there were four; our first and second attempts at filming, our preliminary task and our actual film without music.
PROS:
Putting the videos up on YouTube and setting them as 'public' enables anybody to watch the video that you have uploaded, they can give feedback by liking or disliking the video and commenting on the video which shows their personal opinion on what we have filmed
You can see how many views the video has had, i personally like this because the more views it gets the better it is, in my opinion, but if it doesn't get many views then to me it means that it isn't very good and people aren't interested
The videos can also be set to 'private' which means that only people with a password to the account can view the video, we set our film without music to private when it was first uploaded so that it gave all the group members to view it and form an opinion before allowing the video to be put public
CONS:
Although people can comment, there hasn't been any on our videos, which means we haven't had any feedback via putting the videos on YouTube, which would have been useful for improvements
When people do comment on YouTube videos, the comments aren't always nice, some people find it funny to post useless and insulting comments purely for their own enjoyment. This problem arises from the fact that the videos can be posted as public, which allows anybody to view them.
We used a digital video camera to film our media product, preliminary task and used one when learning filming techniques and filming for the first time.
PROS:
Before this i had never used a digital video camera before and so it was interesting to learn how to use one and learn techniques that are available to use to get different effects that you want in your film. We used the camera at some points handheld and at other points on a stand depending on what we were trying to achieve at that particular moment in the film.
We originally had a tape inside the camera, which all of our filming was saved onto, but then one of our group members bought her own video camera and we then had the option to save all of our work onto a memory card, so we switched because we thought that this was an easier way to save what we had done.
PROS:
I used my mobile phone to take lots of photos of possible locations, such as outside forests and a couple of houses that might have been good to film inside of.
I also made some recordings of creepy noises using my phone recorder. I recorded screams, growling, creaking and other scary/horror noises.
In terms of communication phones proved good to update each group member on the current progress of the making of the film, so that we were all informed.
CONS:
I also wanted to use my phone to send the photos that i had taken to our group member Naomi, and so to do this we had to use Bluetooth, my phone couldn't really 'handle' the process of sending photos via Bluetooth, and so every time I went to send one my phone would freeze and I had to take the battery out (because the phone wouldn't even switch off) and then replace the battery and try and send the photos again, eventually all of the photo's got sent but it was a bit annoying when my phone kept on freezing.
The editing software that was used to edit our film was Sony Vegas, the original editing software was imovie and was done on Macs, but we decided that because our group member Naomi had Sony Vegas on her PC it would be easier to do editing as she knew how to edit video using Sony Vegas, whereas with the iMovie on the macs she did not know how.
Before this media project I had been briefly familiar with Blogger, but didn't really know much about it, but i had set up a blog about something else, non academic, but i only did a few posts as i wasn't really sure what to do. But since having to use blogger for this media project i have learnt a lot about the site and blogging in general, i know a lot more about Blogger and how to use it than i did before the project. Blogger is good because it gives us the opportunity to upload everything that we do that is related to the process of the making of the film. every idea that we have can be uploaded, every picture, every piece of video.
PROS:
I find it very easy to upload pictures normally with blogs i haven't got a clue on how to do the simplest of things, such as adding a photo, or multiple photos on one post, but on blogger it is easy to do, and so i can have lots of pictures that i have taken during the course of this project all on one post.
I also like how easy it is to embed a video onto the blog from YouTube, we have watched a lot of YouTube videos on camera technique during this project, and sharing them on this blog is simple and easy for me to do
CONS:
It took a while for the ease of using the site came about, at first i was just doing simple text posts, because i wasn't sure how to do anything else, but that downside arises from my own fault, not because of blogger being generally bad, but this was still a problem that I encountered
Facebook is a social networking site in which you can communicate with friends and family.
PROS:
most of the people that i communicate with on facebook are within our intended target audience for the film, and so uploading photos and making status's about the films progress can be useful for opinions and feedback.
With Facebook, our group member Naomi put photos up of the make up that we were thinking of using for our film, and the person who did the make up (Sarah) also uploaded photos that she had taken whilst doing the make up for us, this way, the whole group had access to the photos and so did other people who might have been interested in looking at them.I think that with Facebook, it is better to upload photos showing the film process rather than making a status about it, people tend to be more interested in looking at photos.
CONS:
Unless they are in our group or doing media themselves, people probably aren't that interested in knowing about what we are doing for our media project, i have had more people come up to me and ask how the media is going, rather than them commenting on a photo from the filming process and asking questions there.
What worked well and what problems did you encounter?
I have explained most of what worked well and what problems there were in the text above, but overall i think the part that worked the best was Google, because all of the images that i have put on my blog (apart from those taken by our group members and myself) have come from Google images, every single one of them, so without Google i would have had to use another search engine which probably wouldn't have been as good, and i wouldn't have very many pictures on my blog, which would make the blog boring.
There wasn't any major problems that affected our project technology wise, but out of the cons that i have mentioned, the one that was the biggest problem for me personally was my phone freezing when i tried to send photos. If the photos had not sent to Naomi then she wouldn't have had chance to decide whether the photos of locations were appropriate for our filming or not. But luckily they did send in the end, but it was just annoying when the phone froze every time.
