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

Web 2.0 has transformed the way we see and use the internet due to the creation of user- generated content which means normal people such as students can get their views heard online. These are the media technologies I have used to help me construct, research, plan and evaluate throughout the different stages of my project. For research I have used; Google: to help find out about different teaser trailers and peoples personal views on them as well as finding tutorials which will allow me to be able to do the practical things on programmes such as Photoshop and final cut pro, a programme I have not used much before this project. Facebook has enabled me to do a lot of research by being able to talk to friends online about research; these sites have made it a quicker and more reliable process to get audience research in. All of this online research has enabled me to broadcast my research to a worldwide audience and a much larger ranged audience as well as being able to collect more accurate data due to the larger scale of people asked, compared to just a few class mates. You tube has enabled me to access thousands of trailers to look at and gain inspiration from as well as looking at user comments to find out what they think is effective and not so effective about that particular trailer. You tube has also enabled to be able to embed trailers onto my blogger account to analyse them and do my initial planning research. You tube also enabled us to search for inspiration for music for our teaser trailer. Blogger is what we have used to organise our blogs, it is simple to use and the results are effective. I feel it is a good way to present our work as we can access and work on it where ever we are and it is easy to improve your work by getting feedback from peers and teachers as they can access it easily. We can personalise our blogs within reason which I have found helps me to do work due to it being more aesthetically pleasing. Blogger is a much more convenient way to produce our media work, as media students we are visual as well as demographically having a high interest in new technologies and being on a computer helps us access this. Flickr has enabled me to do my analyse in a more aesthetically pleasing way as well as making my blog look nicer and easy to follow. The text is broken up in chunks called ‘notes’ which not only makes it easier for me to write my analysis due to being able to do it in small chunks but also makes it much more visually pleasing for people to look at it due to the informal feel to it. Whilst making our teaser trailer our group used media technologies such as: Film cameras: I found this challenging at first but as we became more familiar with factors such as placing the cassette in and practising effective looking shots such as extreme close ups and canted angles, it then became much easier to use and we could experiment more with angles and other factors such as focus. This shot the footage for our teaser trailer. SLR camera: We used this when we were shooting to take still images. Being a photography student, I am familiar with the use of this type of camera. I have also used this camera throughout this project to shoot stills for the ancillary tasks: the magazine front cover and the poster- these stills are very high quality which makes my work look more professional. Due to media convergence, it was extremely easy to upload pictures onto the computer and begin to manipulate them easily. Microphone: We used the Mac computer’s microphone to record the voice over for our teaser trailer. We experimented with this to get the tone and volume right. This was an easy process and on the later audience research we found it was an effective outcome for our group’s teaser trailer. I have used a few different font sites to help me use professional looking fonts such as dafont.com and myfonts.com- I downloaded them from the internet and uploaded them onto photo shop. I have used photo shop a fair amount through this project- my ancillary tasks were created on photo shop, I found the use of this programme quite easy as I use it on a daily basis and we learnt the key processes in last year’s media. My ancillary tasks were produced on this programme. Our music consisted of tracks found on one of the group members hard drive- copy right free and also the voice over recorded on the Mac’s.

At first, I never thought I was going to get to grips with the editing programme final cut pro. However, when you familiarise yourself with the key principles such as logging and capturing the footage and the time lines and simple effects such as ‘fade to black’, the editing process became a lot easier. Learning to cut pieces of footage and place them together in an effective way challenging at first but when we all got used to the razor tool, this also became a lot easier. Final cut pro is great for drastic editing. For example; our lighting at the beginning was far too light but following a few simple steps on final cut pro we were able to change the whole look of the footage by adding a few simple filters. We added a grainy filter on the first half of our teaser trailer as it was set in the 1940’s and we wanted this to appear more obvious to the audience we were able to easily create even lighting throughout the whole teaser due to being able to select ‘copy attributes’which enabled us to copy the filters over with the exact same settings. Our group had a great deal of trouble creating inter-titles for our trailer; we became adamant on the inter-titles appearing to be like water but due to the cheap looking filters we were able to access and after the class response we soon realised this was not right for our teaser. We then settled for simple yet effect black inter titles with white writing on- we added filters to this writing to get a glowing effect. Within our trailer, this is a clip of footage in the second half of the main female protagonist when she finds the music box- she opens it- we thought it would look good to have a subtle beam of light coming out of the box to indicate the box being possessed by a spirit. However, after spending a lesson fiddling around with lighting effects and the brightness we decided to leave this effect out as it did not look as effective as we had hoped. We decided to record a voice over after finishing the main bulk of the editing and we had a lot of fun going through all the different voice effects we could select, it was hard to select an appropriate voice at first but once I got used to hearing them it became a lot easier, final cut pro has a very good sound balance. Our group found it challenging to select a place to put the voice over, we did not want it to clash with other audio but we did not want it to stand out too much, we settled for putting it at the end of the trailer, which I feel worked extremely well. It was hard familiarising myself with the two different audio timelines at first but I soon got used to it, also being able to change the volumes of the original film footage came in extremely useful and the creation of the razor tool enabled us to move sound footage and place it in other places.

I feel I have gained a lot of knowledge on different media technologies throughout this project and I feel I will continue to use this programmes such as; Flickr, it is an easy and effect way to do analysis in a visually aesthetically way. I have now created my own blog as I find the aspect of being able to create my own posts and people being able to comment on them as well as being able to comment on their views very interesting. I would like to continue using film cameras as they are much easier to use then I had anticipated before working on this product.

I have thoroughly enjoyed putting my work into a blog, I much prefer this type of work rather than sitting down and writing an essay. My other A2 subjects include photography which has enabled me to present my work well.

Microsoft word and similar programmes can be very unreliable so to have the comfort of blogger always saving unsaved work as a draft is very good. Using a blog is a lot more convenient, I have found it a lot easier to do work- there is no need to have to remember to send your work home or carry a memory stick around- as you can access the internet everywhere. Using a blog is a lot more aesthetically pleasing, we can place our own pictures as well as pictures found online to create a visually pleasing blog by breaking down large chunks of text. Blogger enables us to be able to upload work from other websites such as flickr which I feel is a good way to present our analysis in a visually pleasing way.