Evaluation Pt.3

Evaluation Pt.3

During the research and planning stage I used a variety of technologies to help me gain information and post things onto my media blog via blogger. Blogger is a good format to use to present work particularly because you can embed videos and pictures which helps to convey your points across to a greater extent. However taking this into account, it isn’t the easiest website to use, I don’t really like the way it open up a new tab every time you switch between the actual blog and blog postings, it can get fairly confusing and clustered and hard to keep track of where you are and what you are working on. Saying this I can’t think of a better format in which to present the coursework unit. Another key technology was the use of YouTube and DVD’s, as I was able to grab all of the clips and films that I needed in order to complete my research and planning, and this ties in well with Blogger because of the ability to embed videos. IMDB was also a great resource for obtaining information. This website contains all the relevant information about films that were needed for my research and planning. On this website you can see who directed each film, the cast, a synopsis of the narrative etc. this proved a very useful resource and helped me out a lot during my research and planning stage. All of these different technologies have enabled me to gather and present a substantial amount of information that meets the criteria for the research and planning stage.

The construction phase was very very heavily media technology based. To make the magazine cover and film poster I used Photoshop as I could use this to edit my photo’s, play around with different effects and add text to make sure my ancillary products looked like how I envisioned them to. The ability to use layers in Photoshop is a major advantage over other software, this enables you to edit different parts of the image separately and make fine changes without upsetting the overall image. I am very confident with using Photoshop so this was no trouble and I have no complaints about the software. Also when creating my movie poster and my magazine cover I used my own personal Wacom graphics tablet, as I found this easier to work with than the mouse and it enabled me to make more delicate adjustments. We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our video and again along with most Adobe products, this was straightforward to use and was a very powerful piece of software. It enabled us to edit our video clips together to make our final trailer, and also change the colouring of the clips and add transitions to make sure the final product ran smoothly and looked like a proper trailer. In my group I did the majority of the filming, and for this I used my own personal Sony A580 DSLR camera, because of its superior HD filming abilities and the fact that it could shoot high quality pictures as well. We used this because it was much more versatile to use than a standard video camera, because we could change the aperture and the shutter speed and the ISO so we could achieve the desired ‘look and feel’ that we wanted in our trailer. To get sound clips for our trailer we used freesound.org because of the wide range of loyalty free sound clips. We found one that worked well with our trailer and the website was very straightforward to use and we were successful in getting the sounds we wanted. All of the media technologies I used in the construction phase proved to be very useful and they all lived up to their expectations, enabling me and my group members to put together a decent piece of work.

 

I also used media technologies in the evaluation phase which enabled me to support my ideas through the use of images and video. Again the ability to embed videos and images with Blogger has helped me out a great deal, as my media evaluation is backed up with photos and videos which helps to better to understand the text. I also used YouTube again for the evaluation phase to show the focus group our rough cut trailer. This meant that me and my group could pin point exactly what needed changing in our trailer and what people liked about it so that we could make the relevant changes and additions. Another media technology I used was Flickr. I am already a confident user of Flickr because I use it to store and present my photography and illustration work, so using it was not a problem. Experience aside Flickr is a very easy and straightforward program to us and it contains powerful tools to help you present work. I used Flickr to present my movie poster and my magazine cover analysis, the ability to add notes over top of photos that show up when rolled over by the mouse is a great feature, and has enabled me to present my analysis in a neat and straightforward fashion. All of the media technologies that I and my peers have used during this coursework unit have provided us with the tools to create excellent pieces of work, and not one piece of software has let us down.