Question 4
- 1. Evaluation Question 4 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
- 2. Blogger Blogger is the website we used to present all the work we produced, this ranges from our research to our completed documentary. The website enabled us to display videos and pictures as well as things such as power points. The website is easy to use and lets you create drafts which meant I could continue to edit them once I had finished. The website also allows you to upload videos, prezi’s and also pictures onto your blogs, making them interactive.
- 3. Production Throughout production we used a canon XM2 for all of our recording, this also included a tape to capture all of our footage which . When filming still shots such as our interviews we used a tripod, this helped keep the camera sturdy and make our documentary look tidy and professional. When we filmed our interviews we used a clip mic, although this created problems for us as the first time we tried to film two of our documentary's we didn’t plug in head phones to check our mic was working, because we didn’t do this we had to re-film these interviews which took up a lot of our time, though it was also a good thing as the second ones we did were better because we knew what worked well and we also decided on better questions to ask. Before filming our documentary we had to plan what we were going to do, we did this by creating a story board, then took pictures of them with a Samsung smart camera to then upload to our blogs, this meant we could refer back to them to know what to do, but also meant we could change our ideas to make them better.
- 4. Post Production - Editing To edit our recordings we used Adobe Premiere Pro, this enabled us to capture clips of our filming that we did want and also delete unwanted footage that had either gone wrong or we didn’t want. Through the programme we were able to add transitions in between different clips to edit out jumps, these transitions were things such as dip to black and cross dissolves, these made the documentary transition well. We were also able to add music through this programme and edit the sound levels to make it fit in well with the visuals. At one point in the documentary the footage we had taken was too dark and so a tool on the programme made it easy for us to brighten the image. When some of the footage was shaking we could make the picture larger to give the effect that it wasn’t. at one point in out documentary we have a cutaway that we wanted to speed up to make it drag on less, this was easy to do through the programme and we could also slow it down if we needed to. We also used this programme to create our radio advert.
- 5. Creating our poster Firstly we decided and planned our poster and then took all the pictures we were going to need, when we had all of our materials we added them to Photoshop to create our poster. We found creating the poster rather difficult because there we many elements to what we were trying to create, though this was made simpler by having layers that you could separately edit. When we added the title we decided to change the colour to pink to make it relate to what it was saying better. Because we had decided on what channel to show our documentary on we got their logo off the internet and also used the same font to display when it was being shown.
- 6. Hardware and software Throughout our documentary we used a lot of hardware and software for not only the production but also the post production. When doing work outside of college we used zip drives so that we could then upload the work onto the college computers making it simple and also time effective. Using the Samsung smart camera was an easy way to take all the pictures we need, for example when we had to take pictures for our poster we were able to upload them easily and quickly. When first planning our documentary we made many notes on paper, and so that they weren’t lost or forgotten about we used a scanner to upload them onto the computer so we could same them as pictures and easily access our notes.
- 7. Microsoft and Blackberry I used many Microsoft programmes in the creation of my research, for example I used Microsoft Word to write our questionnaires and then used Microsoft Excel to create the data into graphs to put onto our blogs. We used Microsoft Word for many things such as our formal proposal and our filming and editing diaries, I find it easy to use, I think things such as the spell check make it very useful and because of this I usually write out my blog posts on their first before copy and pasting them into blogger.
- 8. Internet programmes When we had finished our documentary to put it onto our blogs we firstly needed to upload them to YouTube, this made it simple to send it and to also do our audience feed back as people could easily access it. Within our documentary we added archive footage to make the opening sequence more exciting, we found all these video clips on YouTube, this is also where we got our music, and using an online converter we were able to put them into our documentary. With one of my evaluation questions I decided to create a Prezi which is an internet site where you can create interactive power points online. This site enabled me to make my evaluation question more interesting by adding pictures and also ‘paths’ which is a certain route the person viewing follows. The programme lets you add pictures and videos to make it even more interactive.