The document discusses several technologies the author learned to use while constructing a thriller film project. These include Final Cut Pro for video editing, adding transitions and credits; YouTube for uploading and sharing the finished film; Survey Monkey for creating and sharing surveys to assess the target audience; free sound websites like freesound.org and Incompetech for finding diegetic and background sounds; a Panasonic video camera and tripod for recording footage; and the class blog for organizing and storing and research and project work.

1. +
What have you learnt about
technologies from the process of
constructing this product?

2. +
The first technology I learnt
to use was ‘Final Cut Pro’.
Final cut pro is an editing software that is available to
purchase on the app store. It is very extensive and you can
do most things to your film. An example of what you can do
is on my left. There are many sounds options you can
choose. Ranging from ‘Transportation’ to ‘sci-fi’ sounds.
There is even more options to use as which are shown at
the bottom of this slide. Although I didn’t utilize most of
them to their full potential in my thriller. However, I did find
the transition effects very useful especially during my
blackout scene. I also used the credit effects which I found
was useful. The option was still there should I needed to
use them. As well as using Final Cut to edit my film, I also
used its sharing option which meant I could share my film
straight to YouTube which saved a lot of time.

3. +
Another technology I
used was YouTube
YouTube is a well known video
sharing website. I used
YouTube By being able to
upload my footage on their
website. By doing this, I was
able to put my video on the
Media Blog for others by linking
it on there.

4. +
Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is a survey cloud based software that provides customers with
free, customizable surveys in a variety of possible ways. You can choose from
open questions and closed question with many different formats. For example
you can choose to have your data in a bar graph or a pie chart. An example
of a what the graphs look like are to the left. I have learnt to use this software
because it meant that I could have an idea of who I was aiming my thriller at
and who is my target audience as well as some more ideas to add to my film.
This website was useful because it was simple to use. All I had to do was link
the survey onto my Facebook and twitter which meant that people could click
on the link and fill in the survey that I had made. It was also extremely easy to
make the survey due to the instructions on the screen.

5. +
Sound websites
In my thriller, I used two different sound programs. The first one was freesound.org. I thought this
website was fairly good. I mostly used it for diegetic sound. For example I used it after the ‘Blackout’
scene when the protagonist receives the text and it makes a stereotypical ringtone sound. The sound
was easy to download from the website and import into my film which made me think about using it
more. However, my film didn’t need much diegetic sound because most of it was already picked up on
the camera. Incompetech I found was a great website to use. It features many soundtracks that is
perfect for thrillers. The filtering system is extremely easy to use and I was able to find a suitable
soundtrack for my thriller which fitted in nicely to what was happening on screen. As well as this, most
of the soundtracks aren’t copyrighted which meant we were able to use the music as long as we
mentioned in the film or on YouTube who it was composed by. In my case, I used a soundtrack called
‘Anguish’ by Kevin MacLeod.

6. +
Equipment
The camera I used for my thriller was a Panasonic HDC-TM900. It is a high
definition camera which has a 32gb built in memory and a 3.5inch touch screen.
The camera was used for two purposes. The first was to obviously record my
footage. The second was to record certain diegetic sounds. This included the
chair noise when the protagonist threw his chair backwards. Another piece of
equipment I used was a tripod. It was easy to use and did its job well by reducing
camera shake and when I needed to record certain bits of footage on my own.

7. +
The blog
 The blog was used to put all of our coursework into
neat folders. For example, there is a folder for the
research and planning and a folder for our main
task (the thriller). This came in helpful because I
had a place to not only store my work, but also had
a place to organise it as well.