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

At the beginning of the course I had little knowledge on how to edit and construct a film and the most I'd ever used to edit before was iMovie on my mac when I was very young. Therefore throughout the course of the year I have learnt a lot about the technologies that are vital for the construction of media products. Very quickly I started to pick up on different camera angles and their uses, which led us to create a thriller where suspense and tension played a key part. I learnt that low angle tilts showed the characters as dominant and unpredictable, whereas a birds eye shot would show the characters as being vulnerable or insignificant. This knowledge came in useful when constructing the thriller because it allowed us to add intertextual references and confirm generic stereotypes.

I firstly had to learn how to use a camera, with the assistance of a tripod I gained the knowledge needed to start filming my thriller. Overall the camera work was not the issue due to the information already obtained in class. Instead, the editing software was the hardest obstacle. At first the my lack of understanding limited me to only working on the simple side of things, but after learning more about how to edit I branched out further to all aspects of the edit. I learnt how important titles were and when to place them within the thriller. I also learnt the importance of cross dissolves and creating non-linear narratives in an understandable way. Editing the sound was a key feature to the edit because I had to remove all the sound and then replace each scene with a looped dragging sound in a way for the dragging to fit with each scene but also work well when creating a sound bridge. We captured and edited our film on Premier Elements, this was a new experience for me and I found it at first quite hard to navigate the software. After a while I realised the perks of using premier elements and began to understand the complex system of stitching two shots together, how to cut the shot at the exact millisecond for the maximum suspense to be created.

The blogs, were at first irritating, due to the images being unwilling to move without deleting work I found that the blogs were highly inefficient and stopped me from progressing with my ideas and understanding. After some time however I got my blog up to scratch and found that organising and presenting my ideas on the internet made the work much more enjoyable and efficient.

Youtube, which had never really played a part in my life thus far, suddenly offered a new opportunity for annotating and analysing work, This became useful across the entire board, not just with constructing my thriller but also with researching Tv Drama. I analysed specific scenes and learnt more about the camera angles and intertextual references through this process. For example, we linked the characters of Peter, Blake and Tiffany to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. This was effective because we created a modern day version of 3 iconic characters after analysing specific thrillers and genres.

The Internet Movie Data Base became very useful throughout the course because it allowed us to research thrillers and thriller genres at the click of a button. We could find out about the director and link two of his films together to create intertextual references. I also found that the Internet Movie Data Base was very useful for screenshots and plot summaries of films that were unobtainable. For example, from the Internet Movie Data Base I found the thriller "Fargo" and managed to make key intertextual links between the two.

Overall each piece of media technology has had its own effect on my understanding throughout the course, but the most interesting of all has been Premier Elements, which taught me how to use all aspects of my knowledge at once in order to create a final product I could be proud of.