When carrying out work on our project at college we were expected to use Apple MAC computers, however I had no prior experience to this unlike my fellow group members, so I did find this a struggle. Little help from the lecturers also made this harder as when asking for help they would often forget. By finding my own way around the MAC computers I feel that it made me work harder to try and achieve what I wanted to as it was more of a challenge. Although at first I found it hard to use a MAC, I gradually picked up lots of skills that I would be able to use when producing the work for this topic, for example I became very familiar with different shortcuts, as I was used to only ever using English windows computers, the shortcuts did appear very off to me at first, however after getting the hang of them it did become second nature. I am now very comfortable with using MAC computers and feel that I have gained a wide variety of skills around this project.
I also study photography at a-level and therefore I first felt as though I was at an advantage with the still image side of the project. I regularly use Photoshop when producing work for my other course, and therefore I already knew my way around the programme whereas most of the rest of the class did not, this meant that I was able to quickly go through the tutorials and work we were given on Photoshop and begin my project sooner as for me it was merely recapping basic skills that I gained in the programme last year. However when it came to producing a magazine cover and poster, I did find it slightly difficult as this was not the exact kind of media which I was used to working with, creating effective text I found a challenge as I was not totally sure how to produce something that related well to my work, however after running through several different scripts and asking for audience feedback, it soon became clear which was the most suitable and from there gave me a strong idea of how I was going to go about the different codes and conventions in which I needed to use. 
Final cut pro is definitely my biggest weakness, I find the programme overly confusing and I feel that it has a lot of unnecessary features for students of our age and standard, no matter how hard I tried to pick things up with this programme, it only made me more confused. However I was lucky as my fellow group members were both confident with the programme and helped me along the project. I felt as though I did not really learn a lot about using final cut pro apart from the very basic things. However we did have a lot of fun editing our footage as a group and trying out different things. We continuously made changes to our film as we wanted to edit the footage down to our best shots in order to make our film have strong components making it a successful piece. By doing this we was able to refine our work throughout the project, chopping and changing ideas as we went.
Last year in our media project we also used an XL2 camera so I had some background knowledge of how to use it, this made the work this year a lot easier for all of us as we all had previous experience with the same camera. We chose to use a tripod whilst filming some of our scenes as we wanted to the footage to not suffer from camera shake, but instead have still smooth movements. On some of the scenes we chose to not use a tripod so that it had a handy cam feel to it, for example like in the Blair witch project where they’re using point of view shots so that you feel as you are the person running through the woods, I felt that this was effective using both methods as it gave it a more interesting feel to our piece, also as it was a horror and always chopping and changing in our trailer to create suspense, it also help to create tension.
We used the photography studio in order to shoot the photos for a film poster and magazine cover, doing this was extremely quick and simple and both paige and I are photography students and work in the studio on a regular basis, however 3 of the flash lights on this day were broken, and therefore we were limited to what effects we were able to use, we thought about the lighting very carefully and decided that having a blacked out back ground with harsh shadows would be the most successful approach as it would suit our plot. It only took us about 30 minutes to shoot all of the photographs in which we needed, and we made sure we shot lots so that we was bound to get a wide variety of images in which we were able to choose from for our poster. We also shot our images using a canon 450D which both paige and I both had previous experience using. Josh did not need to know how to use this camera as he was modelling for us, and therefore unless we used a self timer which is generally less reliable that shooting the images yourself, he wouldnt have needed to.
I also used search engines such as internet explorer, safari and Mozilla Firefox, I used these in order to research background information which i would need to know in order to start my media project. I found these all very simple to use as I use these during everyday life, particularly for research during my previous and ongoing education, this meant that the research process in which i went through was very quick and simple. I made sure that I looked into professionals reviews of work in order to get a good strong research base, rather than bloggers take on certain things. This made sure that I had a clear and concise background knowledge on numerous things which i needed to know.
I used my phone to record videos and clips of people reviewing and talking about my work, again this was easy as i use my phone on a daily basis. As I own an iphone i was able to record the videos and upload them straight to blogger as i downloaded the blogger app so that i would be able to blog whilst I was away from a computer. This made life a lot easier as i was able to publish any thoughts and ideas which i had, exactly when i had them so that i would not forget.
All in all I think that my use of technology has been very wide spread, and even though i found a few aspects of it both challenging and difficult i have accumalated many new skills which i will be able to use if needed in the future. If i was to re do this project i would make sure i took more time in learning how to use the editing software so i was not as reliant on my group for help, to do this i would be able to watch tutorials in order to help me progress without having to ask subject specialists or other members of my group and class for help. I believe that this would have made the editing process a lot quicker and easier.
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