Question 4How did you use media

technologies in the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stages?

When planning my documentary I used a number of different media technologies. When my group where firstly planning our ideas we typed all our ideas up onto Microsoft word so it would be easier to look at our ideas and could quickly make copies if they where needed. I also used word to type up questionnaires for audience research and to type up interview questions and so we knew exactly what we wanted to ask the person that was being interviewed. Once we had collected all our answers we used Microsoft excel to produce graphs and charts to show what we found from our answers

To find out the information I needed for my documentary I used a number of different websites, this was to find contact details for people we would like to interview and also places that we would like to record in such as the dance teachers and dance studios we found a dance school in our local area and emailed the dance teacher to find out weather we could record there. We also looked for a dance shop in the local area and phoned them but we found that we could not record any footage there because the shop owner didn’t wish for us to do so. I also did some research on Google and Wikipedia about the style of dance that I was not so familiar with. I also looked at YouTube videos of other dance documentaries so we had ideas of what camera angles and shots looked best for when we where recoding our own footage. YouTube was also used to gain our archive footage. I used a Firefox plug in to download the archive footage from YouTube that we wanted to use in the documentary, this is so we could get the videos at the highest quality possible and make our documentary look more professional

When constructing my documentary my group used many different types of media technologies. When filming our footage we used a SONY HXR-MC2000E camera, this is a high quality HD camera, we used this as the high quality recordings would make our documentary look more professional. Although the camera had a built in microphone when interviewing people we used a clip microphone so we could have a better quality of sound as we thought this would also make our documentary look and sound more professional. Once we had gained all the footage we needed for our documentary we used a USB transfer cable to take the footage from the camera to the computer so then we could begin editing the footage together to make our documentary.

Once all our footage was on the computer we used an editing software called adobe premier CS5, this offered us with lots of editing features. We firstly imported all of our video clips onto premier, we did not use all the video clips we had but it was helpful to have them imported onto premier.

We used many of the features in the effects bank. These features include tools to improve the sound quality, and example of this would be to remove the background noise. This helped my group make our documentary look more professional. The software had an effects bank which let us add a number of effects. this helped us improve the sound on our documentary, an example of this is the interviews that we used the clip mic had to use the fill left tool as the sound from that part would only play out of the right ear of headphones so by filling left it would play from both headphones.

When creating our opening sequence we used overlays of flashing lights as we used show lights on the title of our documentary and also on the newspaper advertisement as we wanted the sequence to resemble a music video. We also used the green screen when recording, this is so we can remove the background off video clips. To remove the background we had to use the chroma key in the effects bank, this is where you select the colour that you wanted to remove and changed it to transparent, we had to us similarity effect as all the green screen was not exactly the same colour so this would also remove all they colours that where similar to the colour we had selected.

The dancers that we used for the green screen where then too large to fit on the screen, we had to us the resize tool to make both of the dancers smaller, this is so they would fit on the screen, we did this so they could fit on top of the letters that we wanted them to dance on.

We also used transitions such as cuts and dissolves that where part of the software to change from one clip to another. We also used the transitions to bring the name graphics on to the page, we used a slide in to bring the graphics on the the page, and a slide out to remove it from the page, we did this so the graphics didn’t just suddenly appear on the page as we thought it wouldn’t look professional if it did that.

I also used adobe premier CS5 to create the radio advertisement by isolating sound clips from the videos that where used in the documentary and adding the altogether.

This is the graphic in the middle of a transitions. It is sliding on to the page.

I used adobe Photoshop CS5 to create the name graphics and poster for the documentary, Photoshop has a number of different tools that allowed me to edit the poster and name graphics to make them both look more professional.

For our poster we exported the image from a video clip from our documentary. As the image was not a great quality we used some editing features to improve the quality of the image. Firstly we used the blend tool to blend together parts of the background that where not a very good quality. I also cut around the image to remove parts that we didn’t want to include such as the black line above and below the photo.

The above image has an black line between the wall and the floor, this is where we used the blend tool

We the added the subtract effect to the image to change the colour of the ballet shoes from pink to black, this is because we wanted the shoes to stand out from the background and we felt that they didn’t when they where pink. We also thought that it would make the image look more abstract as channel 4 newspaper advertisements are usually quite abstract we added the subtract effect to that layer to do this.

We then added a layer of stage lights over this image, we did this because we used a stage lights image in the title on the documentary. We also thought it would make the image look more abstract.

We also used Photoshop to make the graphics for the name tags in our documentary. We did this by drawing a black rectangle using the shapes tool, we then added an image of a dancer on another layer and put it over the black square. We then the black and white effect on the dancers layer to change her from colour to black and white, we then used the she shape tool again to add the stars around the dancer. We then added the text to it so the persons name who we where interviewing and also what their occupation was would appear below them as they spoke.

When carrying out my evaluation I used a number of different software's. I used Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft word, and blogger. I also used my apple iphone to record peoples audience feedback of what they thought about the finished documentary. As you cannot upload PowerPoint straight to blogger I had to publish my power points on Slideshare and then embed it onto my blog.

I also used blogger to publish every part of my work.