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

Blogger was the website I used to present all of my coursework research and planning, and of course the final products. This website made it easier to keep the work in one place so that I could keep a record of what I had done and what I still had left to complete. As Blogger is a multimedia platform, I could upload and embed any images and videos alongside text, thus making it able for me to describe and demonstrate my work more easily and it also made my work appear more multimedia, instead of blocks of text which wouldn’t really portray the different forms of the media. I very much like the fact that Blogger can connect to other websites as, through this coursework, I uploaded a lot of Slideshare presentations onto Blogger to present my work. The fact that the uploading was such a quick process made it a lot easier for me. Although Blogger has proved to be a great advantage throughout this coursework, I have run into one or two problems along the way. For example, at times when I tried uploading new work, the writing would go into different sizes and different font styles for no particular reason. When I tried to change this, it would just stay the same. This made the process of posting work onto my Blog extremely time consuming as I wanted it to be presented nicely; however some of it still hasn’t altered for me. Similar problems were caused when uploading images as it was so difficult to control the layout of the images along side the text in the posts. I think the layout of Blogger makes it very difficult to use. Furthermore, my labels refused to show up on the side of my page so it has been very difficult for me to go back and check through my work.

Here is the video camera we used to film our horror trailer (Panasonic HDC-SD800). We also used it to take still photographs for our magazine covers and posters, and also our location shots when starting our preliminary work on ideas for places to film the piece. We decided to use this camera for the still photos instead of an ordinary digital camera as the quality was a lot better. I would personally say that this camera was extremely reliable and efficient for use. The fact that it is such a good quality made it possible for us to film at all different times of the day and in different weather conditions without it being damaged. This camera was very good and clear at auto focusing, which helped us when we were taking extreme close up shots of objects or characters faces. The fact that this camera came with a tripod made our panning shots very effective as we could move the camera sideways, keeping the movement very still. I can’t say I ran into many problems with this camera, although at times it did tend to run out of battery very quickly. This became a problem when we were filming as we would have to go and re charge it which was very time consuming. This wasn’t very helpful when we were on a very tight time schedule to get the project completed.

When we were in the stage of pre production for our horror trailers, I used YouTube with my group to look at a series of random horror trailers so that we could get a better understanding of the different codes and conventions within the horror genre. We could therefore use certain trending conventions in the creation of our own horror piece to make it look as much like a horror as possible. I also used YouTube to present links onto my blog for short clips from certain horror movies. Our group later used YouTube to publish our final teaser trailer because it is free to use and one is also able to embed it to place it on the blog. Once it was on YouTube, our group could then take screenshots of particular parts of the trailer to present in our evaluations on our blog. YouTube, being the biggest and most popular website in the world for the distribution of videos, meant that it was extremely easy to use and we ran into no problems within the process.

I wasn’t expecting to use a phone for any type of footage during the media coursework; however it did in fact come into use for a small bit of filming. When I was filming a child on a swing to place at the start of our horror trailer, I wanted this footage to be of worse quality than the rest of the footage on our trailer. I wanted this part to appear like an olden day video to present a skip back in time. This was where, at the last minute, I decided to use my own phone to give the video more of a distorted and pixelated effect. Using this as a camera, I was still able to film a variety of long shots and close ups. Overall, I was quite happy with the result as I managed to add to this effect even more on Adobe Premiere Pro; however we ran into a series of issues uploading the footage from my camera onto the program. At first it refused to open, and then when we eventually got it to open, we couldn’t get the film to cover the full screen. We never managed to sort this issue out; however we then decided we preferred it as it made the footage appear even older.

I have use Google a lot this year to gather up images primarily for my research and planning. When writing big blocks of text on Blogger, I wanted to separate it with images to make it more interesting and appealing for those reviewing my work. Google was therefore useful to find images of posters for films I had been talking about. Google was also useful through the ‘History Of Horror’ post we had to create at the start of the academic year. This was at the stage where I knew nothing about Horror within the film industry. Google made it possible for me to find out all the relevant facts and information I needed to know. Most importantly, I used Google to find inspiring magazines and posters which I could use to base my template on for my ancillary tasks of the horror magazine and poster to make them look as realistic and conventional as possible.

During the planning and research stage, our group had to do some audience research. For this, we sent out questionnaires online through the website survey money to look into the audience for horror movies and the aspects of horror which frighten them. This was very efficient as the public answered our survey very quickly after it was sent out. Therefore we had a lot of time to gather all of the information and decide, judging on the audiences responses, what would be the best features to include in our horror trailer. We ran into no difficulties with this website at all when producing the questionnaire. It is very straightforward and quick to use.

I used Slideshare this year to present on Blogger my research and planning stages. Before starting work on this A2 Media Project, I had never heard of Slideshare before; I was only familiar with Flickr. When I found out about Slideshare, I thought I would try it out as I had produced so much of my planning and research work on Powerpoint that I thought this slide hosting service would prove the most suitable. This website has been extremely straight forward to use and upload my work onto Blogger. I have used it for my magazine and poster analysis, as well as my trailer analyses. I have found that it is a lot easier to post my work on Blogger through this than uploading text directly as this keeps everything the size that I want it to be and I am able to put the images exactly where I want them without them moving about. Slideshare also connects to Blogger well, as one is able to embed the presentations. This program as a whole has given me no problems whatsoever.

For the construction of our group’s horror trailer, we used Adobe Final Cut Pro. This was the most important piece of software we used towards the production. Using this program, we put together the footage and added the different transitions and sound effects where necessary. Before starting in depth work on this A2 media piece, I had never used this program before and it looked extremely complicated; therefore I decided to go onto YouTube and watch a selection of online tutorials to learn the programs basics. Final Cut Pro is an extremely professional program, therefore there were endless edits we had the ability to make on our trailer. Although this program proved to be very beneficial most of the time, its frame rate lowered on more than one occasion, meaning we had to render the project. This was very time consuming and it worried our group a lot. There were also moments when our work on the program disappeared, meaning that we had to close and open it again. I very much liked the fact that we were able to cross fade different transitions of our footage to give a nice overlapping effect. This gave the trailer a lot more rapid shots which we wanted to use to build up the pace of the trailer to follow other professional horror trailer conventions. I worked a lot on the brightness and contrast within this program to make our footage even darker, giving it a more gloomy effect. The only other problem we ran into was with sound effects and music. There was no problem putting the sound and music onto the sequence; however there were parts of it which wouldn’t play and we couldn’t seem to find out why. This meant that we couldn’t use a lot of sound which we were hoping to.

I used Adobe Photoshop for the construction of my magazine cover and horror poster. Already being familiar with the basics of Photoshop as I used it a lot last year for my AS media task, I was able to work on my new ancillary tasks this year without any hesitations or anything to learn beforehand. However, with Photoshop this year I have found out so many new things which I didn’t realise existed on the program. Photoshop has allowed me to take my original photographs and completely adjust them to make them look like scary horror ones. For example, I found a new feature on the program to render ‘lighting effects’ . This feature made it possible for me to edit the lighting of the photograph about on a separate layer to get to the exact style I wanted. Within these lighting effects, I made use of the flood light as I wanted the edges of my horror poster to be in black with a fade in to the main image in the centre. I then used a soft spotlight along the top to make the oval where the flood light effect began less harsh. I also used Photoshop in the planning and research stage to produce a mood board for my trailer. For this task, the blending and smudge tool came into particular beneficial use as I was able to merge the images together to make it appear more like one picture. Overall, I don’t recall having any issues with Photoshop this year.

We used the program GarageBand to explore a wide variety of soundtracks which we could use in our final piece. We selected a couple and added them onto final cut pro. I personally found this program quite simple to use; however I understand that other members of my group ran into one or two complications.

Web 2.0The vast majority of coursework that we do in other subjects is all written based, without the use of images or videos breaking essays up into small sections. This new web 2.0 approach I have had to adopt throughout this course has given me the opportunity to use more aural and visual resources to express and evaluate what I want to say with greater ease. I would say that using the web for this piece of coursework has been a lot more engaging for me than writing a traditional essay as my work has been presented in a much more attractive and appealing way. With Blogger, I have also been able to present and leave all of my work in one firm location which I can access any time I want. If my teacher has any feedback, I am notified on the website itself; therefore I can easily remember what I have got to alter. On the other hand, I do believe that using the website Blogger to present my work has made me miss out on some vital pieces of information which I would have included had it been an essay. The fact that I have to make my texts a lot shorter and less dense on Blogger, means that I don’t get to develop and express my writing as much as I would in a traditional essay. I would say that the use of the blog was exceptionally time consuming as I had to focus on the layout a lot more than I would in a regular piece of coursework which follows the same format and font throughout. A part of me does prefer the idea of writing a full essay as it is so much more reliable than web 2.0, which can’t be entirely trusted to save work. Web 2.0, as a whole has been excellent in trying to get more members of the public creating new personalised work on websites such as Youtube, google, wikipedia, slideshare and blogger. Web 2.0 has made it so that anyone in the world can access information and resources that are put online, and I find this extremely beneficial.