Throughout the making of all my products I used a lot of technology. Through the research and planning stages I used Youtube a lot. Youtube was very helpful as it allowed me to see previous teaser trailers from real life films like dawn of the dead and I am legend as well as other media students products that they had made in the past. This helped me get ideas for my product as well as see the expected codes and conventions that are seen in horror films, especially zombie films. Last year with my AS coursework all my of my work was recorded in a book with pages of documents and the odd photo, this year I have used blogger to record my work, this has been very helpful. Because of using a blog instead of hand writing everything with the chance of error i could write on the computer with the help of spell checkers and saving the work. But what Blogger really stood out for was that i could present my work alot better than if i was to do what i did last year. It allowed me too add images and videos to my pieces of work to help make my point clearer as well as making it more entertaining.
When constructing my teaser trailer, filming the footage was probably the most important thing. I filmed using a Sony Handycam, this did allow me to do all the basics of filming but in reality if i was to ever make a professional media product the equipment i would be using would be alot better. I think this did effect my media product as it could have looked a lot more proffesional had i been using higher quality equipment. That said it would have been a lot more expensive and harder to learn how to use. Once I had filmed my product i uploaded it onto an apple mac, this piece of equipment is probably one of the best around for making homemade style movies. Once uploaded onto the Mac i would use the application Final Cut Pro, this with the power of the Mac would allow me to do loads of things to edit my footage to make it look as proffesional as possible. Last year for my coursework i used the programme Imovie to edit my work, its a very easy programme to use, but its also very basic, therefore that's why this year i switched to the more advanced programme. Final Cut Pro allowed me to crop down the footage and put it into order, and then use transitions, effects, filters and sound effectsvto make the footage effective. The problem with Final Cut Pro is as its a more proffesional programme than iMovie it was a lot tougher to use, and my knowledge of how to use it did restrict me into only using fairly basic effects. Had my knowledge been stronger, the programme has a large amount of power and i could have made my product to a very high quality.
On the Apple Mac i also used an application called LiveType. This was a great tool that allowed me to create titles and text, I used it to make the title of my film that was shown in the trailer and the production company sequence that also show in the trailer. With this programme you could choose from a huge library of fonts and then edit the text to look pretty much exactly how you want it, then you could add on animations to the text to make it stand out and look very proffesional.
When creating my two ancillary products I used to programme Photoshop. The great thing about this programme is that it's easy to use for both proffesionals and amateurs and the possibilty of what you can create are almost endless, meaning you can create a very high quality piece of work. I had to create a film poster and a magazine cover, I found the programme most effective when i was editing the main zombie character, but it was still very useful to use to make some of the smaller parts that just help make the product look that little bit more like it's a real product. As i was fairly new to the programme i couldn't do some of the really advanced stuff that can be done but i think it helped me create two proffesional looking products.
When evaluating my product I again found Youtube very helpful as it meant i could upload my teaser trailer, and anyone in the world could watch my trailer and comment their opinions of what they thought of my product. In theory this would have been brilliant for feedback, but in the end my trailer didnt get many views even after i advertised it to people to watch and give me feedback. I also uploaded all 3 of my products to Facebook to try and get some feedback from people but again there was not much of a response.
Without these technologies my product wouldn't even be filmed yet, let alone have sort of editing. So i have definitly used a large amount of technology and found it really useful, yet with a bit more knowledge towards the programmes i'm sure my products could have been even better.
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