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

ConstructionProduction

For primary photography we used CanonDSLR’s, the same cameras we used in theprevious year. I was already familiar with thecamera however I learnt some newtechniques over the course of the projectsuch as manually focusing and adjusting theexposure and brightness, which allowed meto create a much more professional lookingproduct. We used the same camera for photoshoots both for the Digipak and the magazinecover.

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To create the digipak and poster we used Photoshop to edit and present the images used on the final versions. Photoshop was

difficult to get used to as we had no experience before hand in using the tool.

However it’s vast amount of tools available to us made it easy to create a professional

looking Digipak and poster.

Post Production • For the entirety of editing we used

iMac computers.

• At first we used iMovie for editing because we had used it in the previous year and it was familiar and easy to use. However we decided that it was too primitive and switched editing to Final Cut Pro, a much more versatile program with many more tools to utilise.

• We used Final Cut to manipulate features of our video through cutting, effects, lighting, speed and transitions.

• We used cross cutting for most of the video to jump between the various parts of the story. These were usually accompanied by fades or dissolve edits.

• We used some effects to enhance the imagery such as filters that made the shot look darker or colder as well as ones that made the imagery look bland and colourless without making it black and white.

• We also used a lot of speed effects such as slow motion to lengthen shots or to dramatize a specific expression on a characters face.

In this sequence I used cross cutting to swap between shots of Annalise and Callum (who is sleeping) to shots of Callum and Vanessa in London. Callum is dreaming of his time with Vanessa which we see through cross cutting. He wakes up for a moment (cut back to him and Annalise in bed) but goes back to sleep (cut to Callum and Vanessa in London again) through this the audience can infer that Callum desires Vanessa. This is further suggested through the use of effects, we used ‘Romance’ an effect that enhances the lighting and gives a glowing look to the images. I used it because it created a dream like look to the shot. This is one of the reason we chose Final Cut to edit because iMovie doesn’t have the same features.

Research• We mainly used the internet to research Paloma

Faith to get an idea for what her style and motifs were. This was mainly through the use of google.

• We used google to look up websites associated with Paloma Faith such as RCA records and Epic Records whom she is labelled with. We used this to find out what her audience was like so we could appeal to them with our own production.

• We also used Paloma’s own website for the same purposes.

• We also used social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to see what kind of audience she had by observing her audience members tweets and statuses. This helped us better understand the people we were aiming for.

• For researching our audience we had first hand feed back by interviewing our target audience and recording using the Canon DLSRs. We edited these interviews with iMovie (as this was before we converted to Final Cut)

• To present our research we used tools such as Prezi, slide share and powerpoint.

PlanningStoryboard + Animatic

To create the storyboard and the designs for the posterand digipak, instead of drawing on paper I used a specialdrawing program ‘Paint Tool Sai’ and a Wacom drawingtablet to create the storyboard on my PC digitally. Thismade for a better quality and more detailed storyboard asthe tool allowed me to erase any mistakes and there wereno problems that you would get with pencil and papersuch as rips, smudging or folds. I then used Sony Vegas toedit the images into the animatic. This allowed us tovisualize how we would film the scenes and made it easierto do so as we already knew what to shoot.

Animatic

For task 1 I used Word by Microsoft to construct the mind map/spider diagram. I used the images from my video using a

‘snipping tool’ to take stills from the video and insert them onto

the page. I also used the internet and google images as well as

YouTube to find images I could use to demonstrate my points. I then

used word to position these images in a aesthetically pleasing pattern and used the text box tool

to write my points around the pictures they related to.

For task 2 I used the website Prezi.com the home of the prezipresentation tool. I created a presentation on prezi using images from my video and ancillary tasks as well as images of similar products on the internet using google images. I was already familiar with using Prezi from my AS course so it was very easy to use. I found it simple to import images and videos for my presentation and using the various tools for positioning the frames and text bubbles.

For evaluation task 3, my team and I used iMacs and the

application Photo Booth to record videos as we spoke about

how our audience helped and responded to our products. Once it was recorded we exported the

footage to Final Cut where we edited it. We also used the

internet to access previous works on blogger and used the tool

‘grab’ to take stills of our work. We then used Final Cut to put these images alongside part when they were referenced.

After this we exported the videos to QuickTime and uploaded them

to YouTube.

For task 4 I have used Powerpoint to create a slide show. It was easy to use as I have utilised powerpoint for years and the tools were all familiar to me. Inserting images and videos was very simple and it was relatively easy to present my work in an interesting way.