Evaluation Question Four

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

From the onset of our project, I have used many different types of media technologies, to try and reduce the difficulty of the different stages in the project (Research/Production/Evaluation) using the variety of technologies i did, I believe it produced a good all round promotional package for a movie trailer.

The first day we began the planning we used a website called Blogger, this is owned by google, and you can post anything you like on Blogger which obviously relates to our trailer, and this is where the examiner can review our progress because it records everything we do. It has been extremely useful in the whole procress and I would recommend it to people in the future, one of the best aspects was that you could create a post, and refer beck to it when you needed too, for example from planning to production, you need to link things together. My teacher can also look at my blog whenever me or him feel necercary to do so, by adding comments, or typing in the address, friends and family can also do the same, which is a brilliant as when we are in the production stage he can identify things that should be changed, and offer us guidance.

This was not the only online media I used to help me throughout the project, Google was a brilliant help, it was very easy to use, and using Google Chrome with Google and Blogger maximized internet speed because they are all linked and work well together, for example loading images was fast. The answers Google gave to me were always relevant to what I searched (unlike some search engines), it familiarised with key words, like horror, film, trailer, it links them together so you don’t get mixed up results, this was great in the planning process, and when creating the film we needed to know how to create gif’s (a type of image that moves) and we found it right away.

I have also been looking at a website throughout the process, which is a magazine also, this has up to date information on recent horror movies, and constantly has updates, so I can refer to this when people develop new trailers/poster/websites and apply some of their ideas to my own. The website is called www.fangoria.com.

YouTube has been one of the biggest helps in the planning stages because Google suggestions would also give up YouTube clips because is the biggest online free video viewing website in the world, and all of the clips in my planning stages of the Trailers are all from Youtube, I created and account so I could keep refereeing back to the videos I ‘favoured’. We also used this online media technology to upload our trailer on at the end so our friends and family could give us feedback (this was now the only way we gained feedback’

We also used social networking sites to our advantage, with all of us having facebook, and some have twitter, we can link our work into our social life, which we had to do when it comes to audience feedback, these sites were really good, because we know how they work and the responses are quick.

Media technologies we used that were not online were things such as Microsoft Office tools, when you press the PrtSc button, which captures the screen, when you paste it in Power Point, you can save it as an image, and then put it on your blog, this saves lots of time and makes like so much easier when your explaining things, it also provides proof that it’s your own work. PowerPoint also helped us make many things, like posters, and the texts we added into our trailer. Microsoft Word was also very useful in the production process, because I made a plan on here, and a table to help us film.

To capture our video clips we use our Sony Handy cam, because it is easy to use with good active electronic image stabilization and a built-in USB cable for quick uploads. It gives us nice clear videos and also has very clear results, it’s also nice and compact which is good for travelling and hand-held shots. The camera we are using to take still images is called a Nikon D40, this is a brilliant small compact camera, and is very efficient. It has a 6MP and the images look very good.

Our editing software was called Windows Live Movie Maker, we had no access to a Apple Mac to use IMovie because our clips wouldn’t load, which was a real shame, as you can only make one video on movie maker at a time, so we couldn’t save it and upload the video to make progress, so to prove we made progress we had to screen shot what we did each time. The plus to Windows Movie Maker was that is was fast, and it have nice effects, and you can add sound, which is able to be turned up and down in both the clip and the sound itself. We could also silence some clips, and change the colours to make them appear darker than they actually were. I wouldn’t like to go into major detail about this as I have done so previously on my blog.

Personally the evaluation process was made more interesting with blogger because you can add images in where you feel necessary , and make it look visually better and enjoyable.

Even though I felt I utilised many media technologies in this, I could have perhaps used many more to decrease the pressure on our team, I now have a phone which I never had a phew weeks ago, and it would have been good to keep up with my blog and using social networking sites whilst on the go.