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

Throughout this project we've used different types of media softwares, websites and networking sites as well as hardware to help us pre-production and post-production as well as creating the product itself.


Obviously throughout the whole project, from start to finish, I've used this site eBlogger to host our blog where I've put everything down from the planning of my product, to the audience research and now the evaluations and the final pieces, So, out of all the different types of softwares and websites we've used I can easily say that this site has been used quite a lot, maybe even more than any of the other softwares and websites that occur in the picture above, because this is where I'm putting down all my work, in a quick, easy and presentable way. Although I have liked using this blog and exploring the different ways to make it work as a medium, I think there has also been a lot of things that have not been so successful by basing my project through a blog. I really liked how it was an easy, casual way to document my work and allows you to look through my project and watch it developed, I think that certain things would have worked better using traditional ways - such as essays etc. I found it hard to take some of my essays and use the blog as a medium using different images, video clips, etc to make my point. But I do like how using a blog allows me to use everything from images to video clips to make it more of an experience than just, a blog.


The main thing during pre-production was to collect our audience research to discover our target audience and what they would want in our product. We set up a questionnaire on www.surveymonkey.com which allowed us to create a multiple choice questionnaire for our audience to take, and we could collect research from. To advertise our questionnaire in the bid that our friends and mutual friends would take it, we used www.facebook.com, which is obviously a social network site where most people about our age have a page, and therefore it was a quick, easy way to promote our questionnaire and was the best way to grab a large audience in such an easy, simple way. I shared a link to the survey as on my page which appeared on the homepage of Facebook for everyone to see, and hopefully click the link and take the survey. Once we had done this, and got some idea of our film I began using Photoshop to create a mood board of ideas that I found scary, and what I thought were a good idea to be used in our trailer (The mood board itself is on this blog in pre-production planning). I'd had a lot of use of photoshop before through AS media, as well as using it on my mac at home where I've often played around with it, so for these reasons I had a good knowledge of photoshop and producing a mood board was quite easy.

After pre-production planning was complete, and we had an idea of what we wanted our trailer to be like and had drew up storyboards that we could work from for ideas, We began the trailer itself. We used the college's camera to film with, and quite often didn't use a tripod to give it a more home-video effect in the bid to make our film feel more realistic and life-like. However we did use a tripod at sometimes. After each time we'd been shooting we'd upload the footage to our macs, where we developed our trailer in Final Cut Pro. I'd never actually used Final Cut Pro before but I found it was quite easy to pick up, a lot easier than I thought. We used Final Cut Pro to produce our trailer, by importing clips from the camera into the software and placing them into the work space of the software where you build your clip. I learnt how to produce different transitions, from the simple cut (allowing for continuity editing to work well) as well as fades to add emphasis to different areas of the clip. We had included a lot of ideas in our storyboards that involved using the macs to produce CGI for our trailer, such as the scenes where the shot is black with a typewriter-like font scrolling out words and their definitions. This was also quite easy to pick up and I felt it worked really well. However we also used photoshop in this part of our project as well to produce newspaper articles that we had overlap each other during the trailer - The poor photoshopping however made this look very weak and not how we had imagined it was going to look. When arranging the music, we had a very specific idea of how we wanted it to be - with the use of bass notes on certain areas that we compared next to cult-like chanting in other areas. We used Garage band to produce our music and, although the music doesn't work as well as we'd hoped, It was fun to play around with the software and come to terms with it whilst we tried to produce a good, scary soundtrack.


Post-production, we were set the task of producing a film poster and the front page of a magazine to help promote our film. Before doing this I done an analysis of two film posters and 2 magazine covers, so I could look for different conventions of these things as well as the way different companies make posters/covers look interesting and bold. I done these analysis' on www.flickr.com because it allowed me to upload my images, and choose certain areas to talk about why it is effective, or isn't, and if it fits in with typical conventions or not (such as fonts, images, colours, etc). I then moved onto my products, which I used photoshop for to produce a film poster for my film, as well as the front page of 'Total Film' magazine. I used original photo's of the final girl from my trailer and created each product from scratch - including the Total Film logo. Throughout the project everything was being uploaded to this website, www.blogger.com to allow all my work to flow through, and my final trailer was uploaded to www.youtube.com which allows me to embed it onto my blog. Youtube allows the public to watch my trailer and is a quick, easy and free way to post videos onto the internet and allow people to give feedback.


Over all, I feel I've used a broad range of different softwares, as well as websites and hardware to produce my final piece, from pre-production planning to the actual product itself, as well the post-production planning. Having already had some knowledge of certain things (such as Photoshop, or eBlogger) meant that my project has flowed quite smoothly in some places, whereas learning how to use new software such as Final Cut Pro and Garage band has been challenging, but all worked together in the part of allowing me to finish my final product.