Question 4 – How did you use media technologies in the

construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Blogger (blogspot.co.uk)

One of the main resources we used for our media work was blogger, a blogging website where you are able to upload work and discuss ideas in order of time. I have placed all of the work I have done for this media project on blogger from my initial research and planning, my progress, audience feedback and ideas to my final products and evaluation work. We have used this website in each stage of our work.

YouTube.com

We used the media website, YouTube, for a few reasons during the creation of our media coursework. Firstly, we used this website to view existing film trailers to help us decide what genre of trailer to create, then once I had decided to create a horror film trailer I watched the film trailers for ‘The Woman in Black’ and ‘Orphan’ to get ideas for my own trailer. We also used YouTube to upload our videos of the target audience research conversations and upload our own conversation videos that we created on photobooth.We also uploaded the rough cuts of our horror film trailer and the final version so we were able to get audience feedback and people are able to view our work and comment on what we have done. We have used this in most of the stages of our work and it has been a very useful and effective website.

Final Cut express

My group and I created our film trailer using the programme ‘Final cut express’. We were able to film our footage in our chosen locations and then upload our video footage to Final Cut and edit it appropriately. Final Cut allowed us to edit the length of our shots and cut out sections that didn’t work well. Also, we were able to include fades and slow down or speed up the shots. We added the sound to Final Cut that we had downloaded or created on Garageband.

Garageband

We created our soundtrack on Garageband. We recorded some sound such as the jewellery music box sound and the scream. Also, we recorded the voiceover rhyme at the start of the trailer on garageband. As well as the sounds and music we created on garageband, we got some of the sound from websites such as Freesound where we typed in a key word such as ‘scream’ and a selection of sounds came up for us to test and use in our trailer.

Photobooth

To video ourselves discussing our ideas to place in our blog as evidence of discussion of ideas, we used a programme called Photobooth. Also, to get our audience feedback for our rough cut, we used this same programme and the audience members sat in front of the webcam and shared their ideas to the camera. After creating the videos we were able to upload them to YouTube and place them into our blog.

Digital video camerawith a tripod

To film our media work, we used a moving image camera that we borrowed from college. To help our work be more professional and take still, realistic shots in our chosen locations, we used a tripod. We took the camera and tripod along with our props to the locations we were filming in. We used this in the main stage of our project to film. If we were to carry out this project again I would use a better quality, more professional camera. We would be able to borrow one of these from college. I came to this conclusion because I decided that the camera we used wasn’t of a very good quality meaning some of our shots weren’t as professional looking as they could have been if we had have used a better camera.

imac

For my media work, I used an imac. Using an imac instead of a normal PC made it easier for me to create professional and effective work. In particular it was much easier and more effective creating my magazine front cover and poster on a mac because I was able to use resources such as Photoshop and the editing programmes. As college provides us with imacs to use, we had access to them very easily. Using Photoshop helped me to edit my images and create a professional looking magazine front cover and film poster.

Still camera

We used a still camera to do our test shots and our actual shots of our main character to go on our magazine front cover and film poster. We also used a still camera to take pictures of me and my group members doing our work. We also used a camera to do our recce of locations.