BaskervilleProductions

Evaluate your use of new media technologies in research & planning,

construction and evaluation.

What is ‘new’ media technology?

• Until the 1980’s media relied primarily upon ‘old’ media print and analogue broadcast models, such as those on television and radio.

• The use of technology has transformed media!• It has created a new paradigm – new ways of

thinking about media, new ways of using it and in particular new ways of bringing us together in our uses of media.

Definitions of New Media

• It is digital (the basis of new media), interactive (the appeal) and collaborative (the effect) – our work being shared with you via the blog is a good example.

• Manipulates time and space – you can view it whenever and where you want, for example home, work.

• Global – audiences are wider (work is global on blogs) – we have global research possibilities.

• New media rely on digital technologies, allowing for previously separate media to converge. Media convergence is defined as a phenomenon of new media. Convergences captures development of future from old media to new media.

Definitions of New Media

Use of New Media forResearch

Research - Advantages• Search engine tools – this helps

to narrow down search results• By narrowing down results, we

are able to find what we want easily

• If we don’t want something in our search results, we place a ‘-’ before the search term e.g. buddy cop film -Tom -Hanks

• Choosing ‘large’ almost always has a higher resolution so we choose this as one of our main filters

• Allows us to upload an image so we can find visually similar images - this is useful so we can find posters with the same colour scheme of what we want for our own poster

Research - Advantages

• Clicking on a genre of a film can lead to other film titles under that genre

• This is helpful as it saves time having to look for each of the films instead

• Having films under one genre can generalise conventions over a large range

• The brief summary of the film in parentheses saves time by not having the need to click on the link of the film if it is not what what we wanted

7

New media opens up huge bodies of research and information to all – it is very democratic in this sense.

Research - Advantages• Like Wikipedia, YouTube

can offer suggestions of films in the same genre

• YouTube users can compile lists of films in the same genre. This can range from amateur YouTubers to established companies (i.e. WatchMojo.com)

• Filtering option to help narrow down results and get specific content quicker

8

An example of the kind of collaborative culture generated by new media.

Finding Music

An easy way to find copyright music.

There’s a variety of music to choose from.

It allows you to search for a certain style of music

There is no charge to using this music.

Disadvantages of search engines• A lot of the time, we had to spend awhile sifting through pieces of

information which is time consuming• Information on the internet isn’t always true so we may end up with false

information• Not everything is relevant for example, Google and YouTube, a lot of content

that isn’t relevant comes up

This has no relevance

New media can be quite random and disjointed – there is no one shared system of organisation.

Disadvantages of Free Play Music • For our trailer, we only needed small

clips of of music whereas with Free Play Music, we had to download a whole track which meant editing it to suit us

• There is a lot of music on Free Play Music which entailed a lot of sifting through

• Many of the titles of the tracks sound like something that would suit our trailer but when listened to, doesn’t sound like what we wanted which is misleading. There are a lot of

tracks to listen to A good example of the sometimes overwhelming nature of new media – too much unfiltered information!

Use of New Media forPlanning

Planning - Problems with storyboarding

• Storyboarding is a very long and tedious process

• If something had to be changed, it takes awhile to redraw the specific shots and rearrange where each ‘post-it’ would go where.

A lot of storyboarding in the industry remains ‘old media’ like this – it may be time-consuming, but the new media alternative is not always better…

The animatic from the storyboard • Taking pictures of the ‘post-its’, proved to be quite difficult because if the

camera was too close to it, it wouldn’t focus properly • Lighting was also tricky • Taking the pictures was quite time consuming

Promotional Campaign• Like this example from The Hunger Games we want ‘portraits’ of

characters in our film revealed one by one as a countdown to the release of our film.

15

New media relies on social networking sites – this kind of campaign tactic works well with fan co-operation creating the all-important viral campaign.

Promotional Campaign

• We want our film’s promotional campaign to be on as many multimedia platforms as possible to increase our presence to rake in audience members

• This includes print products such as magazines, adverts in newspapers, billboards etc.

16

New media can work well in conjunction with old media forms – you do not have to choose one or the other.

Promotional Campaign

• We want to create a YouTube channel for our film

• Trailers, interviews and movie snippets of the film will be made available here

• It can also act as a secondary website - it links to other websites such as the FB page, Twitter etc.

17This is the kind of convergence mentioned in the opening definitions.

Promotional Campaign

• We want a Facebook page for our film as it is one of the most used websites on the internet

• Generate interest by posting news regularly and adding new photos

• Our FB page will also provide links to the fan pages of our actors

18

Helps to promote hyper-diegesis – another key aspect of new media campaigns.

Promotional Campaign• Twitter page for our film provides quick interaction with fans by use of ‘hashtags’• Can post news instantly• Use as a source of countdown• Following cast and crew - this can increase the popularity of the production

company as well

19

Promotional Campaign

• E-mail alert - will only send important updates as we do not want potential audience members unsubscribing to our film update subscriptions

• Will include relevant social media platform presence

• Created in the world of our film (e.g. a letter from our main characters)

20

New media reduces the gap between audience and producer – we are now all prosumers.

Presenting Planning on Blogger

Accessible to allBlogs allow for anyone (globally) to view and comment.

Easy to access at all times

Accessible to other people using the internet

Blogging – • New media tool• Collaborative • Easy to share • Democratic

Work in ProgressAllows us to show changes that had to be made for our products

Allows us to see progress throughout the course.

Viewing other work Allows us to view work from other groups from central hub and also by Google search.

Enables other groups to receive feedback as well as our own – interactivity and collaboration goes two ways.

Shows sharing capacity of new media Technology as a bonus for creativity.

The accessibility and collaboration associated with new media does open up the possibility of plagiarism, which is on the rise as the technology develops.

Text and Images

Enable us to combine text, images and videos altogether

Can place work from a variety of formats into one location

Use of New Media forConstruction

Manipulating Images

Enables us to cut and reorder material easily without anything being permanent.

Due to the changes not being permanent encouraged us to experiment with Final Cut Express more.

New media technology allows us all to be creative and artistic, whatever our traditional artistic skills may be like.

Effects

We were able to use effects such as slow motion.

By layering we could add effects to one layer slightly transparent so that they weren't so sudden.

This is a good example of the kind of ‘pre-packaged creativity’ allowed by new media technology.

Combining and Manipulating Sound

When using music we could use multiple tracks to suit what was going on in our trailer.

We could slow or speed up the pace of trailer.

An advantage to Final Cut Express was that it was easy to import different files such as JPEG, MP3 etc – this kind of compatibility is associated with new media technology.

Balancing Diegetic and Non-diegetic Sound

We were able to manipulate sound so that our use of dialogue was louder than the use of non- diegetic music. We were able to adjust this so that it wasn’t noticeable, by lowering the volume.

Reversibility

We were able to keep raw material, therefore if something was to go wrong, we could easily come back to it.

It allowed us to feel more confident when experimenting as we knew we could start again if something went wrong.

This is one of the biggest advantages of new media over old media – nothing is permanent and the source material remains the same.

Disadvantages of Final Cut Express

• Not everything was straight forward using this package.

• Not always particularly collaborative - we could edit different versions but as yet, we do not have the technology in school to edit the same version at the same time. Not all our tasks were finished to a good standard, e.g. the practice trailer.

New media technology needs to be available to do you any good.

Accessibility

• You can’t use it anywhere – none of our group had access to this package outside of school.

• Not always packages, for example it was difficult uploading work to the blogger, which will not upload Quick Time files as they are too large. We always had to use a compressed format which reduced quality.

New media is associated with accessibility and democracy – not always the case. Developing technology remains expensive for a while.

Photoshop• Extracted the image using the

magnetic lasso; smudge the edges of the image to make them blend more with the background

• House font - applied to poster and trailer

• All of the fonts have a drop shadow - this prevents it from looking too flat

• Layers are important because if one mistake is made in one part of the magazine cover, the whole thing could be affected

• Use of layers organises everything and when labelled, specific layers are easy to find

34

New media has helped to create new kinds of creativity. Manovitch calls it “creativity of selection”.

Photoshop

•We couldn’t use stock images so we had to make our own background by downloading smoke brushes and adding a coloured layer beneath them to replicate an explosion.

•Most of the font is in the colour of white - this is because in trial and error, we found that most colours clash with the background and the characters.

•When parts of the extracted image where lost during the extraction process, some where drawn in and some were re-extracted and re-attached in place.

35

Use of New Media forEvaluation

Comments Function on Blog

This allows people to post comments

Posts by blogs can be seen by anyone at any time

This kind of outside feedback is probably the most useful part of new media technology for us.

New media technology has allowed this collaborative creativity.

Label Filter

It enables you to see anyone's work

You can filter your name to show people which post are yours and this is a useful tool to evaluate yourself individually

Allows choice of format - slideshow

• Sharing function makes it easy for two people to work on something separately but together

• They can contain video evidence with simple text

• Easily dividable – aided collaborative work. Can be shown on the blog via Slideshare

Allows choice of format - Edited Presentation

• Can combine images, text, moving images etc

• Freedom of discussion was needed as value of audience feedback was debatable

• Ideas can be discussed• Able to create a version

that can be fast-forwarded so the whole video didn’t have to be watched

Allows choice of format – Photo Montage

A montage of key images from all our products was put together on Photoshop to allow us to evaluate our use of conventions.

New media allows you to montage your work in this way giving a clear overview of what you have achieved.

We have been able to create separate posts with these contact sheets so we can evaluate as individuals.

Allows choice of format – YouTube Tutorial

We filmed a commentary of the process of putting together a promotional campaign.

We then edited this in Final Cut to include an accompanying slide show to form an online tutorial.

Again, we benefitted from being able to combine work from editing packages and also from knowing there would be an easily reachable audience for this kind of tutorial in the real media world.