Evaluation: How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Scribd.com

· This is a document upload site which allows you to upload word files and embed them onto your blog and other sites.

· I have used it to upload long word files which I would find hard to copy into a blog post.

· I have also used it allow the viewer to view the word document easily.

· An example of me using Scribd on my blog is my screenplay: http://g324meganridley.blogspot.com/2010/03/production-schedule-for-original.html

YouTube

• YouTube has allowed me to look at various tears trailers and clips from period dramas which would help me with researching and planning.


• I have also used it to upload videos onto my blog by using the embedded code given on the YouTube videos information.

· An example of this is on my post about a music video that had given us inspiration to create our teaser trailer:

http://g324meganridley.blogspot.com/2009/12/taylor-swift-story-music-video.html

· YouTube allowed me to change the size of the video, the quality and change the colour and boarder of the video.

Blogger

· Blogger has allowed me to show the progression in my work over the past few months.

· This is done by me creating separate posts with work I have completed.

· I have used Blogger to upload all the written aspects of my coursework and it allows me to encorporate video clips into any post, this is very useful because I can show film trailers that I have looked at for research and show clips from trailers/films to help me describe a certain aspect in one of my posts. An example of this is on post based on research of a trailer:

http://g324meganridley.blogspot.com/2010/03/trailer-reshearch-500-days-of-summer.html

· I find it very easy to use and it allows me to update my work at home as well as school and helps me organize my work better because all of my work is in one place and easy to access.

IMDB.com

· I have used IMDB for most of my research into period dramas, teaser trailers, film budgets, film settings, actors and actresses included in a film and recommended films of a similar genre.

· IMDB works like a search engine but it is classed as a database.

• Without the use of IMDB I would have found it difficult to complete certain aspects of my coursework, for example, research into Period Dramas which helps with researching the target audience and the genre.
  
  · IMDB has been very useful in my coursework especially for research into Period dramas. This helped for me to know the directors involved in these films, the actors/ actress’s, the budgets, the box office takings and were they filmed these films.

Photoshop

· I was able to incorporate several images into one document allowing our posters and magazine covers too include more than one image.

· With Photoshop I was also able to save my work as JPEGs which allowed me to post them on my blog. in good quality.

· Some of the images used on my ancillary tasks were taken directly from our teaser trailer, i was able to do this by playing the trailer as a quick time file and pausing it at the moment in which i wanted the still image of, this way I could right click and cropt the still image and copy it straight into Photoshop Elements.

• To make my images/files in Photoshop more complex I used the layers tool to overlay different images, for example on my poster I wanted to have a separate image on top of the main image, to make this subtle I changed the opacity to 80% which would give it a surreal look and with the image being placed over the image of the sky it would blend in more with the background image.

· Example of using Photoshop is our poster: http://megansa2blog.blogspot.com/2009/12/film-poster.html

Facebook

· Facebook has been very helpful with audience feedback of our teaser trailer.

· It allowed us to post our first rough cut onto Facebook to get audience feedback from our friends and family, this then allows us to improve it.

· The users of Facebook are our target audience so using this social networking site was vital and allowed us to get feedback from different people.

• Appealing to the target audience of your film is vital and for British films appealing to an American audience is even more vital, an example of how important appealing to the American audience is the english humor used in Bridget Jones diary which was not so humorous to an American audience, the references to English culture did not appeal to the American audience so more visual aspects were used, for example the Reindeer Jumper worn by Mr Darcy in one of the first scenes.

FinalCut Express

• We edited and produced the new improved teaser trailer using Final Cut.
• By using FinalCut we could edit our trailer more effectively and had more variety of transitions, filters and other editing tools to choose from.
  
• For example, with having the more advanced editing tools available we were able to adjust a two of our shots. These shots included cars and modern objects in the mise-en-scene. By using FinalCut we were able to zoom in on the footage so that the modern objects were not visible in the mise-en-scene. An example of the what the shot looked like before and what it looked like after:

Before

After

• We were also able to increase the brightness on a few of the shots. These shots were shot in the dark and we felt they were to valuable to not use, so because the user could not see the character in the shot at the time we wanted to lighten the images in FinalCut which we were unable to do in IMovie.


• We were also available to incorporate a split screen in our improved trailer because we were using FinalCut. This we found difficult to acheive but found a way to create a split screen and in the end we feel it is very effective.

I Movie
· We used I Movie on the Macs at school to edit and produce our original teaser trailer, our podcasts, audience feedback and our animatics.

· We did find it hard to do work out of school though because neither of us in our group had a Mac at home resulting in neither of us having the appropriate software.

· I Movie also allowed us to save as a certain file type so that we were able to burn our teaser trailer onto a DVD and upload our teaser trailer and podcasts onto our blogs.

· It also allowed us to use some effects in our teaser trailer such as the use of text over a black backgorund and text over still images which we found difficult at first to do in Final Cut but found in the end that FinalCut has more editing tools available to us.

Live Type

• As i said before, in IMovie we were able to create the titles for our film directly in IMovie, were as in FinalCut you had to create the titles in a seperate program called Live Type.
• We wanted some footage to place the titles over and were considering using a black background that was similar to the style we used in our original trailer, but we found some footage that we shot be mistake of some trees and desided that it was quite effective to have the titles over the shot.
  
• For the other titles we wanted to encorporate the titles (actors/actress's names) into a clip of the person. We did this the same way we created the other titles, we uploaded the clip into Live Type and placed the titles over the footage. We then exported it as a Quick Time file and imported it into FinalCut Express.

Scanner

· We used a scanner to scan our storyboard onto the computer so that we were able to put it onto out blogs.

· An example of when i used the scanner is on this post which shows my storyboard: http://g324meganridley.blogspot.com/2010/03/storyboard-for-improved-teaser-trailer.html

Portable Digital Sound Recorder

· We used this to record the voice over for our teaser trailer and the non diagetic music.

· This was handy because it allowed us to record in a quiet room because it was portable.

· It was easy to use and we were able to upload a few recordings onto the computer.

Camcorder

· This piece of hardware allowed us to record footage for our teaser trailer and our audience feedback.

· It involved using a DV tape and a tripod for shots that needed to not be shaky.

· These camcorders were easy to use and easy to transport around.

· They allowed us to shot our footage and upload the footage straight onto the software we were using (I Movie and FinalCut express)

Free Play Music

• For the new and improved teaser trailer we downloaded copyright free music.


• This was easy to acheive because we downloaded it straight into iTunes as an MP3 ans dragged it accross into FinalCut.
• Further information the the music we used is shown in this post: http://g324meganridley.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-soundtrack.html