In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge froms and conventions of real media products?

Before we went out to film our opening sequence we had to research and plan it. We came up with many ideas. One of the ideas was is that we wanted to make it as realistic as possible. We wanted it to be high quality and wanted to make sure it looked like a professional film. You can produce a professional film opening sequence by using the same type of equipement that the film industry uses.

Our media product uses various forms and conventions of real products. Firstly, when were filming our opening sequence we used a tripod to make sure the footage wasnt shaky this makes it look professional at a level. If we didnt use a tripod the quality of our film wouldnt really be high quality the way we wanted it to be. The camcorder we used was a small camcorder it wasnt the big ones that are used to make films out in the film industry. Even though the camera wasnt a high standard we co-operated with what we had. We used different angles and shots to improve the quality.

We wanted consistency in the making of the film sequence. To make it accurate we made sure that the scenes didnt jump from one to another and that it was consistent. We wanted the film to be accurate as possible therefore we made sure that we kept the same costume when we needed to.

Final Cut Pro was the editing software which we used. This was a really good software to use because we could do all sorts to our original film sequence. For example we could add different effects, colour, transitions and speed the clips. The software was complicated but obviouslyt not as complicated as the one the film industry uses. Even though we didnt use one like the film industry our film sequence was still a high quality media product.

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

We learnt various new skills from various media technologies. A particular one was the use of the Apple Mac comouters. Before beginning our media coursework Apple Mac computers were new to some of us. The layouts and features differ from a 'PC'.

We used a variety of other media technologies which help contribute to the completion of our coursework. A number of websites were used to help with the research and planning in pre production.

We used YouTube to research other film openings such as 'Silents of the lamb' and 'The Usual Suspects'. Our genre is a thriller, therefore the fims we researched on YouTube were of the same genre as our opening sequence. For example 'The Blaire Witch Project'. Watching this we started coming out with ideas on what we should include in our film sequence.

We also used the website called 'IMDB' to research more into these films, from this we learnt who the directors, stars and the running time was for the film.

We used the website Blogger to show all our pre planning and preperation for the preliminary task and main task. It shows everything we've done from the start of the coursework till the end.

We used an editing program called 'Final Cut Pro' which was fairly straightforward to navigate around as there was a help icon at the top of the page if we needed to find a certain effect or transition we could just type it in there and it would automatically find it for us to use. We used Final Cut Pro to capture all our clips and then rearrange them on the timeline. After this was completed we used a tool called 'mark in' and 'mark out' to crop out the clips that we didnt need.





We also used the college equipment which included digital camcorders and tripods, which were easy to use as they had the basic record, pause, rewind, fast forward and play functions. The tripods were easy to assemble as they just required us to open them up using the clips that were provided. When we were out on location filming, we learnt that without the tripod the camera footage is shaky and this wasnt the effect we wanted in our openibg sequence. There was a scene in our film where we didnt need the tripod and we wanted a shaky effect.

Whilst out filming we had to make sure that we recorded a gap before and after the clip we recorded so it would be easier to edit together and cut sections off without erasing the part of the clips that were essential. We also used the digital camcorder to take pictures of our location.

Re-shooting shots

We have been out today to reshoot two of our shots in our main task. The shots we had at first were too obvious that one of the characters were looking at the camera and plus it didn't really go with the genre. So for that reason we decided to redo the clips that didn't fit in and that wern't clear to understand the speaking. Also we analysed our video and we spotted a few mistakes such as jump cuts, we realised that one of the clips where a character called Saba picks up a log to help out with the fire, the clip quickly skips to her talking, which didn't really look right. We cropped part of the clip and lengthened part of it, to make sure it looks right. Everything that were doing in our main task , we do to our best ability. We have really stuck into our project, making sure that everything looks accurate and fits in.