Question 4

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In media studies we use blog is where I would put all my research and planning and show any work that I have done. Having all of my work posted electronically had many advantages because I was able to have all of my work in the same place and the use of tags made it easy to find the post that was relevant to my search. Having it all electronically also made it easier to continue work at home because I was able to save any posts in the drafts section and continue the work from home without going through the trouble of sending it home or bringing in a memory stick which I could loose or it could be damaged. The other big advantage of using the blog is that you can receive feedback from people as they can leave comments. The other reason the blog is brilliant because it shows my planning stages from the beginning to the end. The other thing blog was really helpful as the school had its own blog as well therefore it was easier for teachers to communicate with us and it was clear what work we may have to do. As blog shows every stage of my product and I received feedback at the end of every bit of work I do to make sure am going the right direction and it gives me and opportunity to improve my work.

I used internet which was very useful during the research because it helped me find similar media products and see if there are any conventions which I would need to include within my product and to gain ideas for my own film. The websites I really used was (http://www.youtube.com/) it helped me to see other media products and analyse them. I used ‘’IMBD’’ to search different cinematographers and look at the latest films and find out more about the films and directors. An advantage of internet is that it’s easy to use and find information you need being more specific ‘’Google’’ search engine is really easy to use and you can find a lot of information you need and then you can share it on your blog with others. The website I used was London grid for learning for copyright free sound to use in our film which was quick.

In the planning stages I used Microsoft Word to write up the script and the location Recce which was really easy to use and as I had it at home I had a chance to finish at home which made meeting deadlines easier. I also used Microsoft PowerPoint to produce our pitch and then present it to the class the software was really useful because you can have text and images at the same time which helped us to the our idea across clearer to the audience as we had examples of images and videos. The other task I used PowerPoint for was the photo storyboard as the software allows insert images, but in order to create the photo storyboard I used a still camera which was really simple to use and it was portable.

In the production stage the camera I used was Canon HD XHA1 I was familiar with the camera because for AS opening sequence I used the camera therefore I knew how to function it, however last year I made a mistake with sound for preliminary task I plugged the XLR lead in the wrong place which resulted no sound, therefore this year I asked my teacher to make sure am clear and I don’t make the same mistake as I did before. I knew different functions and techniques with the camera because last year I attended a workshop where I learnt different techniques shots and how to use zoom and how to capture different shots which was really helpful. Therefore the use of the camera last year made my use of the camera more advanced and more efficient and I was quicker to change locations and change angles which really helped with time management. We also used the sound kit for some of the shots for ambient sound, however as our task stated we were not allowed to have dialogue in our film we didn’t really used as much and at the end we ended up having sound through the whole film.

After we finished filming the film we then had to edit our film for this task we used ‘’Adobe Premier Pro’’ which I was comfortable with because I had used from last year and we did a lot of activities of how to edit, however I wasn’t really good at using the effects therefore I used ‘’YouTube’’ to watch tutorials after viewing different tutorial videos I was good at using the effects. Firstly we started of digitising our shots which was simple and straight forward to do then we put our shots in the order of our storyboard then we used the razor tool to shorten our shots for smooth change of each shot. The problem we had with the software was the sound it was the biggest issue because we had to put in the sound each time we log off which we wasn’t really happy about because it wasted a lot of time on. While editing our film was saved on the lacie drive which was really good because it was portable meaning that we could move around to use a different computer as our work was saved on the drive as we worked as a group we wasn’t together all the time editing by using the lacie drive meant that we could edit on our personal computer accounts and we didn’t have any problems and as we edited we came across damaged computers by having a lacie drive it made it easier for us to move to another computer and carry on the editing.

As our genre was comedy we wanted to have animated credits which represents our character, we came up with an idea with having stickmen running into the credits. To produce that we had to use ‘’Photoshop’’ however I wasn’t really good at using the software as we had to create frames of the stickmen moving which didn’t sounded that difficult, however as I didn’t how to use the software it was so as my group members didn’t how to use it. As it was my responsibility to create the credits I was looking for a different software to use and I found ‘’Pivot’’ which is a software to create animations at first when I started it was really simple to use, but as I wanted to insert a background and have objects in the animation it was difficult for me because I never used the software before. I spent some time playing around with the software and then I knew how to use it properly and the I created the short animation sequence which took me three hours to do as I had to do each frame with little movement. After I created the sequence I had to put it on the ‘’Premier Pro’’ which was simple and I didn’t have any problems with it.

When our film was done then we had to complete the ancillary task which was creating a poster for your film and write up a review of your own film. For the poster I used Microsoft Publisher which was easy to use as you can insert images and texts and change the sizes, font and colour. To write up my review again I used Publisher because the software had templates and layouts, however I couldn’t use them because I had to follow a strict layout of the magazine I chose to write for it didn’t take long to produce because I was good with the software. The last task I had to carry out was to write up the evaluation for it I used Word I chose word instead of writing up on the blog because I can save it onto my computer and have it save just in case I loose my work on the blog.