How did you used new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The above image is compiled of pictures of equipment, programmes and websites that I used throughout the process of completing the coursework. The right side of the image consists of all the websites that I used throughout the different stages of the planning, research and construction stages. 

During the research for my products I created a survey on surveymonkey.com which consisted of a variety of questions with relevance to the horror trailer that my group would be producing. This website was good for the job that we needed to do. As well as handing out questionnaires for people to answer. I also placed links to the survey monkey questionnaire on my twitter and tumblr pages. This helped us to get responses from a greater number of people. Getting people from tumblr and twitter increased the number of people who filled out the questionnaire which increased the information that we would take from the questionnaire. However using twitter and tumblr did result in some people who were not in our target audience age range filling in the questionnaire. I feel that twitter and tumblr was a very effective way of gathering audience research.

All of the work that was produced during this course was placed onto Blogger so that it could all be seen in one place and could easily be accessed. I personally do however not like using Blogger as I feel that the layout is restricted and it is very hard to get the posts to look good. When working with pictures in Blogger posts it was also very hard to get them to go where you want them to be. Due to this I had to often use the html text editor to ensure that they were where I wanted them to be. Blogger is very simple to use, which is a good thing, but I feel that it doesn't allow me to maximise the potential of a blog unlike other sites. I also used the website Flickr to produce analyses of certain existent products. This was an effective way of doing this and it allowed me to put text on to what I was talking about so that it was clear. However I personally would have preferred to do written analyses in a more traditional format than using Flickr. Another website that I used was Issuu. This was a very useful website as it allowed me to put my questionnaire result charts all into one place in a simple and easy way. This was then easily embedded on my blog and the research results are now easily readable. I also used Issuu to put my storyboards on my blog because it looks much cleaner than if I had uploaded an image of each page separately. The other two websites that can be seen on the image above are youtube and freeplaymusic. I used youtube to upload my finished trailer to and to also research other existing trailers. Youtube is a very easy way to put a video that you have made on to the worldwide web for anyone to see. It was also a very useful source for research. Freeplaymusic was the website that my group used to get copyright free music to use in our trailers. This website was a very good website however I feel that the way it is organised makes it very hard to find music that will match what you want it for. I feel that it is not categorized very well.

Click the image to be taken to a Flickr page explaining some of the different tools of Final Cut Pro.

The other images on the picture are the technologies that were used to produce the final products. The programme that was used most was Final Cut Pro which is the programme that me and my group used to produce are trailer. It allowed us to do a lot of different things to our clips. As we had not used the programme before to the extent of what we needed it for it took a bit of getting used to using. I feel that by the end of producing the trailer we had a grasp on the programme but there was still a lot that we could no do on it. My group had a lot of difficulty working on Final Cut Pro due to the college upgrading to the use of HD video recorders. The MAC could not handle this footage very well which resulted in Final Cut Pro being very slow to use. We had to render after making even the smallest of changes to our product, and the rendering took a number of minutes. This made it very annoying to use and effected our ability to produce a really good trailer. We also faced difficulties working on Final Cut Pro because the way the video file played in the programme was not how it would look once exported so it didn't really turn out how we had planned. It is a very complex programme that is used in professional industry. Many editors use it to produce films and episodes of TV. For example the TV show Leverage is edited in Final Cut Pro. Seeing as this was the first time that we used the programme properly the finished product is not exactly perfect because it is quite a complicated programme to use. The top left of the image above is a screen-cap of Photoshop CS5. I used this programme to produce my final magazine cover and film poster. I have had a lot of experience with Photoshop over the past year so I felt pretty comfortable producing these two products. I feel that my skills in the programme have developed a lot since using it at AS. Photoshop is a very useful programme as it allows you freedom to edit in a number of different and effective ways.

The final three images on the imageboard above are all pieces of equipment that were used throughout the course. We used a Apple Mac to produce our trailer. Seeing as I have always used Windows it took some time to get a hang of using a Mac as it is so different. To shoot the footage for our trailer my group used a video camera and occasionally a tripod. Seeing as a lot of our footage was handheld the tripod was only used occasionally. The video camera that we used was very simple and easy to work. It also fit easily in your hand and allowed for the handheld footage to be shot with ease. We also used the video camera to take photographs for our magazine covers. We also used studio lighting to produce these photos.

Overall we used quite a variety of technologies during the coursework. Some of them I had experience with and others I did not. I feel that I have learnt a lot about using Final Cut Pro and this is the information that I will take out of producing these products.