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

Throughout this coursework I have used many free websites and cheap equipment to make an effective trailer and ancillary texts. Websites such as Blogger have allowed me to record my process of making the trailer and all the effort that has gone into it relatively easy along with youtube, which allowed me to post my final product onto the internet for it to be viewed. Industry standards such as Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, LiveType, and Garageband have made it easier to complete the main coursework, but also to make them look professional. The combination of Garage Bands along with royalty free sound websites made the soundtrack easier to make and sound far more professional by importing original music then using the program to modify how it sounds. Live Type gave us the opportunity to make professional looking inter-titles which can easily be imported into Final Cut Pro, again making it simpler, faster and more aesthetically pleasing. Finally Final Cut Pro allowed all of the film, sound and inter-titles to be edited and modified in an almost infinite amount of ways with little effort. With Final Cut we added effects to the contrast and brightness to shots, the length of a shot, it's speed, the fading of music and visuals.

By using Photoshop to complete the ancillary texts I could create a more effective poster and film magazine. Photoshop allows the user to create many layers and effects, I was able to customize the colour of the text as well as choose from hundreds of fonts for what was best for my texts. It also made it simple to edit the original image such as erasing the background and editing the contrast and brightness of the original photos. Effects built into Photoshop allowed me to add a lens flare to the torch so it would appear brighter and look far more professional. this program was also used to cut and resize the images from trailers off youtube to be place onto the blog.

Final Cut was used for post production to edit all the shots taken. My group uploaded all the shots we had taken so they were all readily available in the program then began to rougly place all the shots in their correct place using the timeline. By using Final Cut it allowed us to view the raw footage before we added it to the timeline so we were able to check if the shot was suitable. The timeline allowed you to shorten or lengthen the shot depending on what you wanted to do. We also used Final Cut to fade in and out of shots, add some inter-titles, place all the sound, change the brightness and contrast to shots to make them darker so they appear to be at night.

Live Type was used to create most of the inter-titles, it allowed us to choose a suitable font and colour as well as add multiple effect such as how it would enter the shot and its movement. Live type is incredible versatile which made the inter-titles to be easily created and more professional than anything in Photoshop.

Garageband is another program that we used for most of the sounds on the teaser trailer. It allowed multiple layers of sounds to placed over each other and fades to be used at different times. It had a large selection of musical instruments and effects and allowed us to easily insert other sounds we got from royalty free websites. We used alot of rythmic drums and eerie music to form the main soundtrack.

Throughout this course we have used a college supplied camera for all the filming and macs for all the uploading and editing of the trailer. A tripod was also used to steady the camera when needed.

Websites such as flickr have made it easy to upload images and annotate them easily and effectively, As it is also very compatible with other websites it allowed me to upload it straight to my blog for easy of access. I used youtube in a similar way to upload the video then embed it into my blog and Blogger for it simplicity for it all to be found in one place. Youtube is available worldwide and in over 30 languages which allows our trailer to be viewed from almost anywhere in the world, youtube popularity and ability for feedback to be given in various ways, e.g comments and rating allows us to get audience feedback from a large target audience. Youtube has an amazing video statistics section which tell you where this video has be watched the most as well as the age of the viewers. these technologies have allowed to easily broadcast our work to a large audience, Blogger has made it easy for my teacher to make comments and allow me to make changes to my work.