Wednesday, 11 May 2011

Evaluation - Question 3 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?


Within this course work there are three stages, planning, construction and evaluation respectively. When approaching the planning section we used a website called Blogspot.com to create our own blogs that would help us in documenting all of our research and future plans for action. They helped us in our organisation and efficiency by allowing us to keep track of what was accomplished and what was still needed to be done. Their easy accessibility was also a great plus while also saving wastage of paper that would have been impossible to avoid. The factor of storage also made the blogs very desirable, we were able to leave them in a secure area removing the possibility of losing the work. The blog contains evidence of the various software that was used in the production of our film software like PowerPoint, Excel and Word. Word and Excel were effective in helping us construct our questionnaire and the subsequent graph results. PowerPoint was used in the research stage of the creation of our magazine ‘Action’. We took front covers from magazines like Empire and Sight and Sound and then juxtaposed them to help us in making a well informed analysis and comparison. To place these presentations onto the blog we had to make use of online software like Slideshare and Scribd. These programmes acted as a storage device with added embedding functions that helped us to upload the presentations onto the blog. Another online programme that we used was Wordle which was instrumental in helping us brainstorm ideas for our film’s title. We came up with words that were directly associated with the film’s aesthetic which were then jumbled up together, allowing us to conceive the final result of Deadly Obsessions. Communication was of the utmost importance in the planning stage, we used social networking like Facebook to keep in contact outside of school along with Hotmail to send each other links to other material that would be helpful in our course work.
We constructed three different media products these being a poster, a teaser trailer and a magazine cover. We first created our poster, which was done by the help of a photographic camera, Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. We used a colleague’s Olympus DSL camera to perform the photo shoot with the help of a tripod and studio lights. To follow that we used Photoshop for image editing like airbrushing and cropping, the final result was then transferred to InDesign to create a layout, font and an overall aesthetic. The teaser trailer was produced with the help of a Digital (DV) Panasonic Camcorder for filming that was supported by a tripod while using separate sound equipment to have a better vocal range. For the final edit of the teaser trailer which was non-linear we made use of Adobe Premier, this was a laborious amount of work that took us a fair amount of time. YouTube was appropriate for our distribution and output. The magazine cover has the same process as the production for the poster design.
In completing our evaluations we placed our teaser trailer onto YouTube which we then created annotation features for and were made available with or without on the video itself. There is also the comment feature on the website which will allow audiences to give their own opinions and feedback as to whether they enjoyed the teaser or did not and what they did enjoy or did not enjoy. Subsequent to that we filmed ourselves through the use of a camcorder to record our own responses to the final product. Later on we created a commentary recording with the help of a computer microphone, which was then edited with Adobe Premier and will be added on as a new audio track for YouTube.

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