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

Here are some of the different types of technologies I used within the process of constructing my product:

Audacity

Audacity is a program that can be installed onto laptops, computers, Macs and so on. It is basically audio editing software that allows you to mix, crop, and just edit tracks in general. This makes it perfect for what I used it for. What I did was I took tracks I made on another program (garage band) and one I actually recorded myself in a recording studio, and I edited them slightly. More specifically, what I did was I changed the key down putting it in a minor one, the tone, merged two different tracks together, cropped them, looped them and enhanced the volume. This deemed very effective because it gives it more of a tense, thriller-like atmosphere about it.

                                                                                                                      Garage Band and Logic Pro                                                                                                                    

Garage Band is another program I used in order to create the soundtracks for our piece. What garage band does is it is used to take existing default tracks, or custom made tracks to make a piece of music. Similarly to Audacity, you can edit the track and merge multiple ones together to make one master track. That’s what makes garage band unique from audacity, however both programs deemed as useful as each other. Now, as mentioned previously, Logic Pro is very similar to garage band in the fact that they are both used primarily to create tracks aside from just editing. Logic Pro is the program installed on the Macs in the recording studio, which is how I created the soundtrack played throughout the credits. Logic Pro, is in summary a more enhanced version of garage band and used mainly within recording. I used logic in order to properly create my main thriller track as it sounded very professional. 

Imovie

Imovie is what we used to actually edit all the clips together. We inserted our footage onto and Apple Mac and began editing them using Imovie. This program became the most essential and important when it came to producing our thriller, as without this there would be no transitions, no editing techniques, and we wouldn’t have been able to add anything extra to our piece such as logo’s, music etc. Imovie works very well with Garage Band as you could make the soundtrack then simply drag into Imovie ready for use. Imovie includes such editing techniques as adding colour effects, audio adjustments, fade-ins/outs, adjusting lengths, adding titles and so on. In summary, we used it in order to make our chosen footage into a piece of work.

YouTube

YouTube is the website that we used in order to exhibit our thriller. We took it from Imovie, put it on another production called iDVD which transferred it onto a compact disk, then installed it onto a computer. From there, I put it onto my YouTube account which can be viewed by anyone in the world. We used YouTube to get it out there because it is immensely popular and it helps us gain feedback from a target audience. YouTube is deemed an effective site for amateur film producers as anyone can upload and view your video. This incidentally helped us on what we did well and how we could improve.

iDVD

iDVD is software used to convert a piece of video from Imovie onto a compact disk. This helped us get it onto a disk so that we could hand it in for it to get graded, and we could make any copies for ourselves as well. From getting onto a disk, we could then put in onto any computer to watch for our own amusement. Also, iDVD helped us get our piece onto YouTube, so in retrospect iDVD was our main source of advertisement and publicity. 

About the tracks, I used 3 different ones that I made on garage band and combined them into one main soundtrack. This is the one with the ambient, non digetic wind and minor sounding, heavy drum beats. Another track I made was done using a program called ‘Logic Pro’, which is very similar to garage band just slightly more complex and, in all, better. I sat in the recording studio and recorded a guitar track to play over the credits. I then put that track on audacity so I could edit it and mix a non-digetic sound of fire over the top. This just gave it a tense effect and it also fit into the scene well.

Below are screenshots taken from when I was editing some tracks on Audacity:

Flashback Soundtrack

Credits Soundtrack