MG: Question 6: What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making your film opening?

• We used ICT continuously throughout our project and in order to work successfully as a team, we used a blog to collaboratively present our ideas and concepts of our project in the planning process. We uploaded research of other horror films which we could draw inspiration from and our progress throughout the project. We posted our preliminary task video and also a collaboration of our practice shots from Wilderness Wood, which were both uploaded from Youtube to present this progress.
• I feel that the way in which both of these were on Youtube was beneficial for us as we were able to send the links to others in order to get some feedback, therefore potentially improving our final piece; as well as using an online survey, ‘surveymonkey’. We also used ‘slideshare’ to upload our pitch onto the blog to present our ideas and intentions.
• Originally we filmed our whole piece using handicam with a few static shots on tripods to divide it up a bit. However, we found that when it came to watching our footage back, the handicam was too jolty and was often filming the character's feet rather than their faces and therefore not portraying the story very well.
• We then re-filmed the whole opening with a slightly different concept and all in static shots. We found this much easier, and we felt that we could achieve much better continuity this way. We also used the ‘Dolly’ this time which made some shots look really professional.
•  The lighting that we had in our location was not particularly ideal all of the time. For instance, outside in daylight, we had very high quality footage, however, as we went inside and used artificial light, it didn’t work quite as well and almost looked amateur. Despite this, we wanted our opening to look as realistic as possible so this lighting almost contributed to this aspect. 
• When we got all our shots and it was time for editing, we used a programme called Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0. Firstly, we watched back all our shots and then put them together in an order which we all felt worked best. We then cut each shot to the appropriate length and added any titles or transitions which we wanted to include.
• We used the transition of ‘fade to black’ a few times throughout the montage as this showed the realistic time change throughout the evening. We also made our titles move either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in our piece so they would become part of the content.