Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Evaluation-Question 4

Question 4
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In A2 Media Studies my group and I used several different technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages. Below is a list of the different technologies I used.

- Blogger (This site). I have used this site to act as a kind of diary to present all of the information I have researched. I have also used it to keep information into how our production is progressing and to show any problems we may have faced.

-Search engines e.g. google, imdb.com. We used these to research the kind of genre we wanted to use. We researched into popular films to research any conventions the films may have including those in their synopsis, posters e.c.t. It also helped us in our construction. We had to write an email to “The Specials” to request their permission to use their copyrighted song. We wouldn’t have been able to find their contact details without the use of search engines.


- YouTube.com. We posted both our rough cut our final cut of our trailers. We also used the site to viewing teaser trailers for research purposes to see the codes and conventions. We also used it to research and find the music we wanted to use in our product. As well as using it for research puroses we also used it to help us construct our piece. We sometimes got confused when using other technologies such as Photoshop, so we used tutorials to help us.


- Photoshop. Although we found this complex and difficult to use, we produced our Poster using this programme.


- Adobe PremierePro We used this software to edit our trailer.


The main techonological advance for us this year was Photoshop. None of our group had used this programme before in the previous years study of media as we did not have to create ancillary tasks as part of our AS Media project. Because of this we had to learn to use the programme from scratch and needed the help of tutorials and the advice of other students. We found the complex buttons too over complicated but once we managed to find out which processes we needed we were able to quickly grasp the programme.

We struggled to edit the 15 certificate and needed the help of a tutorial such as the one below.

However, once we had grapsed the programme and had watched the tutorials, we didn’t have any more problems with Photoshop. Overall we found that it was effective and useful tool in producing our poster ancillary task. One aspect we found particularly good was the 'warmifying' process which warms the colour of an image. We thoughtthe range of texts available and fonts very useful.




YouTube was very helpful to us during the research, planning and construction of our project. In the pre-production/ research stages, we watched dozens of teaser trailers. It was quicker to use this site as all of the videos are in one place so we didn’t have to waste time trying to find them. This allowed us to see specific conventions within the trailers. In our construction stages we also viewed videos to help us grasp programmes we hadn’t used before such as Photoshop and I also used it when editing if I had forgotten how to use a specific editing tool. After we had completed our product we posted it on Youtube so that it was easily viewable and could be found easily by the group, teachers and examiners.

The editing software we had to use was Adobe Premiere Pro due to it being the only one available at our school. We have had several problems with this programme throughout this year as well as last year. Our school computers have a limited process power and available memory that this programme maxed out. This meant that they ran extremely slow and often crashed half way through editing; losing our work several times. We also had problems when opening our trailer to show people in order to get audience feedback. It also crashed several times and the programme often skipped past some of our clips giving the illusion that the video was of poorer quality than it actually was. Another problem was that the sound quality was sometimes reduced automatically by the programme in order for it to run more smoothly.
Due to licensing the programme could only be used at school; where there were limited computers available meaning that we couldn’t do our work as often as we had hoped. My group and I think that it would have been better if the school had chosen to use a programme that had been free or downloadable so that we could use it at home and could have a longer period to edit in.

Although we chose to create our website on weebly.com as it was easier to use and more readily available than the other option, Dreamweaver, we found that it was quite limited to the amount of features we could use. After completing the website and when trying to publish it we were notified that some of the feautures we had used, e.g. a playlist were only available if you paid for the “Pro” version. This meant that we had to change the layout and features of the website to a more basic version. However, we did include main features such as a link to a Facebook page which would be set up for the movie. We noticed when carrying out our research that most films produced in todays market have a Facebook page to appeal to their target audience of 16-24 year olds. This was the same age group as our target audience so we decided the best way to advertise our film would be via that social networking site (alongside our own website and poster. Another feature we used in our website was a photo gallery. Here, we produced photos of our characters together to show them outside of the film to give the audience a better feel of the characters. We specifically chose ones that were amusing, which coincided with our film.

Overall, we found the technologies that we used throughout our project were useful and helped us to achieve the best work and end product we could. The most useful tool, I think, was Youtube because it helped us throughout our Planning and Research stage as well as our Construction.

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