EVALUATION QUESTION 4:

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

·        Technology was used from the beginning of the Media studies course through the use of ‘blogger’. This allowed us to keep track of our Media studies journey through ‘blogs’ from work that we can upload directly to the internet; It was almost like keeping an online diary. 

·        To do research, we used Google and YouTube to find any established films and case studies that have already been made for example we instantly thought of ‘Mr Bean’. I’ve been using these websites for years so navigating through them wasn’t very difficult. This gave us an idea of the kinds of location we can use followed by props.

 

·        We also used Google images to locate our case studies which were posters. And this gave us notions of how we could make our poster.

 

·        We used our college’s VLE ‘Moodle’ to download film schedules and permission slips which can be accessed virtually anywhere with internet.

 

·        We used a Panasonic C-HS900, a HD camera, to record our film. This gave the film clips a high quality resolution and made it much more professional rather than using standard cameras. Along with this we used the tripod in order to get steady shots without any camera shakes. This was difficult because some of our moving scenes had to be free hand so we had to re film certain scenes a number of times with minimal camera shake.

 

·        Once we had our raw footage from the video camera, we used an Apple iMac in order to edit our short film with a program called ‘Final Cut Pro’. We all had our input using this program with much difficulty but after the use of the help document on ‘Moodle’ we gained a grasp of and was able to understand the tools and could break up video, cut and shorten the length of certain clips to make sure it was in the length of 5 minutes, add sound effects and music, slow down certain scenes for example the day dream scene and the use of transition effects which we thought worked well in a number of scenes.

 

·        We used still images from our short video to use in our poster because it sells the film itself for what it actually is which rather than having a still from photo shoot which could mislead the audience.

·        Photoshop was used to make our film poster. There were many tools in Photoshop we utilized such as the magic wand tool to erase the background. We used the gradient tool to blend the images with the background. We also the blur tool to soften the edges of the images on the poster so they stick out more. This was quite alien to me and my team mates were more experienced in this sector so we decided split up the tasks. I also suggested that we use YouTube to look up some tutorial which came in quite handy to us.

·        To make our film review look very professional we utilized InDesign. This was the first time I had used this program and found it fairly straight forward. However, I soon found it difficult to align all my text boxes with the rulers and took me a whole lesson to figure out as it meant that I had to play with the length of text in each text box and continuously change the size of them.

·        When doing presentations to pitch our ideas and some planning, we also used technology through an online program from www.prezi.com. This is a free online application which allowed us to present our pitch in a quick and easy to understand manner to our audience which looked very professional at the same time.