{Question 4

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

Research stage

WordPress During the research stage we got a variety of feedback

due to the comments given to us by our target audience through our blog which helped us to improve our documentary.

However research from the blog was very unreliable, there were times where our blog yielded no feedback at all and we had to get research through other means.

Digital Camera Having digital cameras allowed us to film our audience

while giving us feedback which we could use as reference when creating our improvements for the next draft.

Having video feedback is much more effective than written feedback because this way we can see exactly what kind of people liked what depending on their sex/age/etc.

However a problem with this method was that the battery often ran out which delayed us in our work.

Digital editing Before we started our main documentary we edited a

quick promo, and this allowed us to get our audience engaged and interested in our documentary while also giving us ideas and feedback that help us make decisions when creating the actual documentary.

However we didn’t reveal a lot in our promo so the narrative was very hard to understand if someone didn’t have previous knowledge of the documentary which confused some members of our audience.

Internet Websites We used a variety of internet websites for research one

of the main websites that we used was Youtube which we used to research and access resources such as real media texts which we used to identify key conventions that would be suitable for our documentary.

The good thing about this is the fact that people can comment on these videos which tells us what people think of real media texts.

Internet Websites For our print advert we mainly used Google images to

quickly and effectively get a range of channel 4 documentary print adverts on one pages which clearly shows the similarities and codes and conventions that channel 4 uses for their documentary print adverts.

However sometimes it was difficult to determine if the advert was created by the institution or if it was created by a random person.

Internet Websites Youtube also helped us to gather audience feedback.

We made a Youtube account however we choose to upload our final cut on a group member’s Youtube account as there were more subscribers which would help it to reach a larger audience.

Internet Websites Youtube also offers some tools that allows us to see who are

audience is and where they are coming from. This is very useful as it gives us an idea of who we should aim our media products at.

Web 2.0 We used Wordpress, Facebook and Youtube to acquire

feedback from our target audience and opinions which helped us plan our future decisions to create a successful media product.

Planning stage

Wordpress Wordpress has helped us to organise our

work using suitable categories and this in turn made it easier for us to evaluate our progress which enabled us to stay on track and manage our time effectively.

Wordpress also acted as an “agenda” where we could create posts and within these posts we set dates for important events which we could access and remind us of these important dates reducing the risks of missing any deadlines.

Mobile Phones Mobile phones helped us keep to communicate without

having us be in the same room. This long range communication helped us plan events such as filming dates and also discuss our plans and future action.

Macs/PC’s

Computer software such as Skype also allowed us to communicate with each other when we were at home. This long range communication helped us plan events such as filming dates and also discuss our plans and future action.

We also used hotmail to send emails usually with important work attachments.

Production stage

Ipads Ipads helped us during the production stage as we

could use them as prompters. This was easily done as there was an app that could do this and this made production much easier as our actors were able to read the script without making many mistakes.

However this also made our characters look like they were reading of a scrip which didn’t make the documentary look professional.

Digital editing We edited the media product using a

variety of editing software including iMovie, final cut pro and adobe premiere.

Using a Variety of software allowed us to use a wide range of tools and experiment with our video clips.

Certain editting software could do things that another software couldn’t do.

Photo manipulation We used Photoshop to create gaming style titles/name plates. To give

the documentary a gaming theme/look. This was an effective way to reveal our characters as these titles are

also intersexual as the same designs are used within the game. These titles are also symbolic as the victory colour (blue) represent

the supportive views of Karan’s decision and the defeat colour (red) represent Mr. Baratheon’s counter views to Karan’s decision.

Photo manipulation We also used Photoshop to create the print advert. We

used Photoshop as we all had prior experience using the software which sped up the process of producing the print advert significantly and reduced the chance of any problems appearing that we would have encountered if we were new to Photoshop.

Voice recorder We used voice recorders to record the audio for the radio advert

we then imported the audio file into garage band to edit the sound.

However we had never use garage band before which resulted in very bad quality sound so we decided to re-record the voice over and edit in Sony Vegas.

Sony Vegas has great tools that could reduce the static sound and remove audio jumps which improved the sound quality significantly.

Internet Websites

We searched for tutorials and guides on Youtube to make the product more professional.

Internet Websites We used Dafont to find a suitable font that we could use

in the intro and name plates/titles. This was a very time consuming process as there are so many fonts to choose from.

We used Slideshare to embed power points into our blog as it was the most effective way of publishing power points.

Digital Camera We used digital cameras to shoot our main documentary.

We used to film with standard Sony camcorders which were very easy to use however the quality was very poor.

so we switched to a DSLR which was very confusing to use at the start however we learned as we went along and the quality was much better.

And again there were some issues with battery life, we were required to do regular checks prior to filming to make sure battery life was sufficient.

Evaluation stage

Prezi We used prezi to create an interactive and

engaging presentation to answer question 2 in our evaluation This also provided a visual aid for our audience as a voice over is narrating over the prezi.

However we were all very new to prezi and it took us a while to understand how to use it properly.

Ipads/Mobile phones Ipads/mobile phones were used to gather feedback as

we could walk around showing passing students to take a look at our documentary which we played directly from Youtube. This helped us in question 3 as we were able to receive feedback from a variety of people due to the fact that it was so convenient.

Digital Camera We used digital cameras to answer question 3. we

thought that this was a good idea as we already had previous feedback videos and rough cut videos that we could include when answering the question in video format

also another benefit would be the fact that its much faster and more accurate to just show the footage rather than explaining what feedback we got and what changes we made.

Digital Editting We edited the voice over for question 1 in order to

increase the sound quality. (remove static, etc.)

We also edited the video that we used in question 3 using Sony Vegas. This was the most convenient choice as we all had windows operating systems so editing with software such as iMovie was impossible as none of us had a Mac operating system at home.

Apple Macs/PC Having a computer allowed us to access software tools

in order to build a website and present our evaluation in a more interactive way.

We used wix to create the website and this has allowed us to organise all the videos and evaluation documents on one easily accessible site.

Audio Recorder We used an audio recorder to create a podcast when

presenting question 1 and to make it more interesting we also decided to add images, etc. from our coursework to act as visual aids as we narrate over the topics.

Adding images will clearly tell people what we are talking about. Having only the sound element in our question 1 answer could be hard to understand as we identifying and describing which codes and conventions we used/broke.