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

evaluation stages?

FacebookIn order to communicate with each other throughout the project, we set up a group chat on Facebook so that we could discuss any important issues that needed resolving and so we could keep up with the work over the weekend when we wouldn’t be seeing each other. This really helped us progress further in our independent study time and handle our time management skills with our coursework production. We used Facebook for research and planning, production and evaluation as it was a useful piece of software that really pushed us to do our work. For me, it also reminded me that I was working in a group so other people were relying on me, therefore this pushed me to complete my work so that I wasn’t letting anyone down.

ResearchTo research more into documentaries, we had to use the internet to search for similar documentaries which would fit our genre. We mainly used Google to research conventions and codes of documentaries, alongside YouTube to watch existing documentaries that would help us gain understanding of what makes a documentary successful. We found some documentaries such as ‘Educating Essex’ on YouTube which were really useful to our research as this particular example was on the subject of education which was similar to our topic. Google and YouTube were safe options for research, as I have used these pieces of software excessively throughout my everyday life and they retrieve information from all corners of the internet which may be useful to us.

Blogger

One software which we used consistently throughout the creation of our media product is Blogger. This was essential in presenting every step of our journey in the process of creating our documentary, which included research and planning, production of the documentary and post production. Blogger is a simple piece of software to use, as you can create posts, name and label them, then add any content which is necessary. Sometimes there were issues with embedding presentations from other software as the file would be corrupt when presenting the blog, however, these issues were often easily overcome by re-embedding the presentation and that usually worked.

PreziPrezi was a presentation software which was a creative way of presenting certain topics, particularly in research and planning. There were several templates which could be used which fit the theme of the topic being presented. Prezi allowed us to be creative with our posts and this would help us show the examiner that we could use several different presentation softwares and develop our skills with media technologies. I mainly used Prezi for the research and planning section of our course, however in the evaluation it also became useful to flaunt our creativeness.

CameraDuring production of creating our documentary, the camera was the main piece of equipment needed to record our footage. We had had a little bit of practice using the camera doing our preliminary documentary, however once we had to create our actual documentary, we had to completely develop our skills and ensure that our camera skills were up to scratch and if we needed to film something we could get straight to it without any implications. We also had to apply camera shots to our footage so that we could make the shot suitable, for example, if we wanted to capture someone’s facial expression we would use a close up shot. Remembering our camera skills was essential to showing that we had a deep and creative knowledge of creating a successful documentary. Alongside the camera, we also had to use a tripod and microphone which had to be set up and tested correctly before use, otherwise there could be serious implications for our footage.

This was our ‘How To’ booklet which demonstrated how we set up and dismantled the tripod safely without any damage to the equipment. This was important as it shows that we understood how to use the tripod properly and this enabled us to quickly set it up and film a good shot when we needed to.

iMacThe iMac was a vital piece of hardware which we had to use for everything in the pre-production and production of our documentary. I had never used an Apple Mac before so this was completely out of my comfort zone and I had to adapt my skills with modern media technology in order to be efficient and create a product which looked good. I had to get used to not being able to right click when I wanted to copy/paste and instead use the toolbar at the top of the screen or use keyboard shortcuts (cmd+C to copy). At first, I thought that the iMac was really difficult to use and I couldn’t get used to the shortcuts, however, by constantly using the iMac consistently, it became second nature to use shortcuts and I found that it was actually very easy to use the iMac.

AdobeThis was the most challenging piece of software for me to use. I knew from previous experience in our AS course that I was not a fan of Adobe. For production, the main piece of software we used was Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 as we edited our entire documentary on this. It was fairly easy to get the hang of, although there was several issues we encountered, such as when all of the files corrupted and we had to get help from the technicians to save our document. We used Photoshop in AS and this software was fairly easy to use in production and post production of our documentary when creating our magazine article. However my skills were very limited because I only really used basic tools such as cropping or changing the hue/saturation/brightness of certain pictures, therefore I could have researched into how to use other tools in order to push myself further. Using InDesign was much easier for me as we had used this for the majority of our AS production and I was used to everything on there. This is what we used for our magazine in both AS and for the TV listing for our documentary, so we had to transfer our skills from AS and also develop our skills so that our magazine was much better for the TV listings.

These were the main settings we used in Photoshop when editing our photos. The main features we used were changing the brightness and contrast.

This was the layout we created in InDesign for our magazine. We found this easy as the software was familiar to us and we had a clear understanding of the conventions of a magazine, so this was very simple for us to do.

GaragebandThis is the software that we used to create the radio trailer. We had to upload the recording from the handheld microphone straight onto Garageband which wasn’t a problem. We also had to insert sound effects at the beginning and end of the trailer to create a trademark sound for the trailer, and we just had to find the sound effects we wanted to use on the internet. The one thing that I struggled with was alternating sound levels and using effects such as fade in and out for sound effects. After watching a tutorial on YouTube, we understood how to change the sound level.

We figured that by adjusting the yellow line on the clip, we could create the fade in/fade out effect.

GaragebandThese were the settings on garageband which we had to familiarise ourselves with.

This little icon means that this file is a voice file. So these were the voiceovers for the radio trailer. We had to adjust the sound levels by accessing the volume settings and adjust them according to the rest of the trailer.

The aggressive stance bass files were the sound effects we used to introduce the trailer and were also used at the end of the trailer. This created a trademark sound for our trailer and we really liked the end effect this had. However, from feedback, maybe we should have used different sound effects, possibly more softer ones which appealed to our audience more.

Handheld MicrophoneThis microphone was used to record the voiceover and the radio trailer. This was an easy piece of equipment to use as it had simple settings and you simply had to click the record button to record, then click it again to stop recording. Although we had not used this type of microphone before, after asking for assistance from the teacher, we understood how to record and upload our clips to the mac. However, sometimes some of the clips sounded muffled or had interrupting background noise so we had to redo the recording which was usually in our free time.