Research: I used the internet a lot to conduct the majority of my research into film openings. The main website that I used and found most helpful was IMDb. IMDb (Internet Movie Database) is one of the leading website with regards to film and television, with all sorts of information on movies, list of actors, production and many other aspects of the film industry. 
Blogging: To keep all of my work together and editable, myself and the rest of my media class have been using Google’s Blogger to keep a personal blog of our media project, including research and the process of making our film opening. I have found it really useful as it has more or less organised my work for me, it automatically goes into date and it’s so easy to use. I can make it how I like it so that’s it’s easiest for me to use and revise from, adding pictures where I deem necessary and changing text if I feel it’s incorrect.
Vimeo: To put videos onto my blog so they are viewable on school computers required me to get an account with Vimeo as YouTube videos can’t be watched at school. A Vimeo account is free which was really handy as it meant I didn’t have to pay for something that I may not use again in the future. Although it takes a while to upload videos onto your personal account, when it’s done it’s extremely easy to add the videos from Vimeo onto the blog. However, because it can take about an hour to upload a short video, it can mean that lesson time is significantly lost as I wasn’t able to continue working until the video was uploaded as I needed it to do the work.
Filming: To film my 2 minute opening, I used my personal SLR camera; as Nikon D3100. At this point, I had only had a few months and hadn’t actually got round to teaching myself how to use the video feature available. I had had a test with it, but I hadn’t actually filmed anything with it. I started off by using it to film my house of cards falling down. When I found out it worked fine, with a decent built in microphone, I decided I could use it for my main project, meaning I didn’t have to borrow one off of the school. My camera provided an HD quality video, meaning that the quality of the video is much better than if I was to borrow one of the school’s tape cameras. I am really glad I used my camera as it made the picture really clear, particularly the shots outside and in the dark, and although a couple of shots are slightly out of focus, the shot looking over the character Sam’s shoulder with Kat holding the torch were surprisingly clear, despite it being pitch black outside.
I also used an old tripod given to me by a family friend. It was quite heavy compared to other tripods I have used in the past, but it was still extremely usable and did the job perfectly. I feel that if I had used a slightly newer tripod, I would have been able move the camera a bit more, as the tripod I used only allowed me to turn the camera 360 degrees, horizontally, whereas other tripods allow the camera to be tilted vertically as well. However, the shot I got using the tripod worked really well in my film opening, so using the tripod that I did was fine.
Music: My brother did the music, but I supervised and told him if I wanted something changed. The software he used was used to record the music was Logic Pro. Because I didn’t use it myself, I don’t know how easy it was to use as my brother uses it on a regular basis for his university course. I did however edit it a little bit by myself in GarageBand when he wasn’t around, and I found it relatively easy to use, especially once I got the hang of how to use it. If music from my brother wasn’t available, then I would have used a copyright free piece of music that it would have found on sights such as SoundCloud, but luckily he was around and willing to help.
Editing: Finally, the last piece of technology that I used to create my film opening was iMovie, available on the iMacs at school. I had never used the software before until I started AS level Media Studies, but because we had practised using it earlier in the year and I had to use it for my Preliminary task, I was able to use it quite easily. The hardest part I found was trying to get the music to fit with what was happening in the scene. Also, the transitions were quite hard as they made the shots either side of them a bit shorter, which is not what I wanted. It took a lot of fiddling around to get the transitions and music in the right places, but it eventually all came together.
The great thing about iMovie was that it allowed me to edit the speed and direction of videos I had shot. In particular, the house of cards. There is no way I could have made the cards do what they did in the production logo, the actual video I shot was the reverse of it. iMovie allowed me to reverse the video and the slow it down or speed it up how I wished to create the desired effect.
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