Evaluation Q4

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research and planning, and

evaluation stages?

Research and Planning

During the research and planning stages of our media production we near exclusively used the internet to gather relevant information. A lot of the inspiration we gathered was by watching other Psychological Thrillers on YouTube, as well as finding good examples of other A2 Media Studies work. This gave us more practical examples of Codes and Conventions of a psychological thriller, something else that we looked up, using other presentations and information pages previously created and gathering their information, allowing for us to create our own codes and conventions which we feel best fit the psychological thriller genre. By doing this it also allowed for us to discuss a way to put our own twist on the genre, thus defying the previously set out codes and conventions and making for a product more appealing to our audience.

By using the internet to look up the codes and conventions of both posters and film reviews relating to psychological thrillers we gained a better understanding of what we were looking for. Because of the ability to access the internet on our phone we could have near constant access to this information, especially when combined with Blogger. By creating blogs on Blogger it allowed us to store our gathered information, meaning we always had easy access to anything we had previously put on there.

Construction Stage

During the construction stage we used multiple forms of editing software, primarily focusing on Final Cut Pro for our video editing and then using Photoshop to deal with our images.

Final Cut Pro on the Mac allowed for us to have easy access to a lot of professional looking video effects as well as an easy to understand UI,

meaning that although we were unfamiliar with editing using the program we could still do it to a reasonable level. The access to multiple visual effects also turned out to be extremely useful as it meant we could simply apply a filter to our footage and give it a black and white or greyscale look.

Construction Stage Cont.

We used Adobe Photoshop when sorting out our film poster and review page. We were familiar with Photoshop due to the tutorials we had both watched online and had in person assistance, meaning that it was easy for us to sort out what we needed as well as keep our images at a professional standard while editing them.Similar to Final Cut, Photoshop has a veryuser friendly UI and takes very little under-standing to use the tools correctly. Again, itallowed for us to easily apply professionallooking effects, thus keeping our images at ahigh quality. Importing images into Photoshopfor use was also extremely easy and took littleto no time to edit.

Construction Stage Cont.

When it came to the actual hardware we used during filming we used mainly a Cannon 400D. Although the location scouting images were taken on a smartphone, the rest of the images and footage were done using a camera. We did not use a tripod or lighting during the main chunk of our filming, mainly relying on natural light and a camera frame to keep our footage steady.

We still used YouTube during theconstruction stage as it allowed forus to find music that was useable inour piece. YouTube not only providesaccess to tons of videos, but also canbe used to look up music that may not otherwise be found on a majority of mainstream music sites.

Evaluation and Conclusion

For our evaluation we used a combination of PowerPoint and Prezi to record our answers to the evaluation questions. Prezi allowed for instant recording of the answer online, however PowerPoint did not provide the same instant online upload. This meantthat in order to put our presentation online we usedSlideShare, creating an online version of the presen-tation which we could link to our blogs for accesslater.

To conclude we used a variety of media technologies throughout the creation of our main piece as well as our two ancillary tasks. Using Blogger as a way to access the information we had as well as store any useful links was a good decision as it meant we did not have to worry about any cloud storage to transfer images or video links between our group.