Evaluation Question 4) How did you use media technologies in the construction, Research , Planning and evaluation stages? - Wendy

Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction, Research, Planning and Evaluation stages? - WENDY ABIRI

(RESEARCH)

In a multitude of way in which media technologies, has helped in the research stages especially in terms of our blogs, the software we use is Blogger ,

its especially beneficial as it’s a well known and established brand/software and we able to easily access the software plus easily broadcast our work including software and products we have designed, so it was easy for use to embed our teaser trailer, magazine covers plus our teaser trailers front cover. Also its beneficial as we can compare videos and illustrate types of videos that gave us inspiration ect If we were to use an alternative  software it  would be to use Webbly however there are more technicalities attached to webbly as sometimes links don’t work properly, thus  more harder to operate . Furthermore blogger is overall adaptable, adjustable to use, and best for how we would like to present our work.
Technologies we also used was the software YouTube ( the picture is our screenshop on our Youtube video)

in order to broadcast our work plus we an embed our video onto other social network very easily onto sited such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter or My-space not only to gain feedback from our target audience which is very useful and we can receive a quick &fast response. The social network we intend to highly take advantage of is Facebook as its good way to present our work plus we have a variation of friends from different countries that can input a variations of perspectives as different countries have different levels of scariness they can handle
Technologies I mainly used to research example film posters or magazine covers, were most from Google and plus there are posters around the media departments which really helped as we can see past A2 students attempts to design a film poster and we could view the designs we want to emulate and designs that we didn’t really want to see within our magazine design. II also would make sure to feedback to the designer or the front cover and magazine cover to use techniques within other magazines and we would make sure the specific techniques where included collectively and we felt like the techniques seen within the magazines would work well with what we envisioned.

Youtube.com is relatively easy website to use as we all use the website on a daily bases to listen to music ect , how it was a little bit hard to upload our teaser trailer onto YouTube as it took a couple of attempts before I could actually upload due to it not being the right type of film and a member of the group upload the teaser trailer but not properly as it was 4mins long which obviously exceeded the below 50 sec that the teaser should be this was due to not checking the work before posting it plus it was due to rushing where we weren’t properly time keeping. The internet is the source of all the software we used as I helped us in the planning stage in the use of researching, when we decided to research about films that helped us go into depth of the physiological horror and most importantly it had the various software we needed in order to create are teaser trailer which I created on Final Cut Pro plus other software such as Garage Band  and Microsoft word which I have used to write up the evaluation and various other word Documents.

 Question 4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? - Martin


To look at this question we must also look at the influence that technology has had on wider society, historically technology could handle one medium or can only be used for specific tasks. An example is that telephones were only designed as a point to point communication system and to transmit and receive sound. However today through the convergence of technology devices are now able to present and interact with many types of media. The perfect example of this is the Apple iPod which was once just a music player but now is seen as a more than adequate portable photo album, video player and radio tuner.

Another example of technology coming together as hubs is the mobile phone, which is no longer used solely for communicating via sound but now includes personal music players, digital cameras, text messenger/email systems and internet access. During our project we were able to take advantage of this as we were able to take still images of our work and moving images of our practice shots.

In our group we also used the internet for most of our work and it wouldn’t have been possible for us to go through the planning stage without it. The internet is the most widespread of technological convergence. The emergence WEB 2.0 has played apart in creating an effective piece of coursework. Web 2.0 websites allow users to interact with other users or change website content whereas the former Web 1.0 are non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information.

In the Planning stage we were able to take advantage of technology by using web 2.0 websites such as blogger which is a free blog publishing website where your able to  share text, videos and pictures, we was able to publish posts of our coursework such as our concepts and ideas of our teaser trailer. http://slasherteaser.blogspot.com/view/snapshot

Also with the society we live in today, technology is improving all the time and this makes it a lot easier to access information quickly and effectively. An example of this that we used is also by blogger incorporating its services onto the iphone, this also allowed us as a group to post some of our information of our coursework ‘on the go’.

Also through technology we were able to present our work in a number of ways such as YouTube which is another Web 2.0 website where we could upload videos of some of our practice shots and see what kind of feedback we can get from it as they are unleashed onto the public and we also made our own channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/ChainProductionsA2

Also we used technology such as phones to communicate with each other such as through BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) which is an instant messaging app on Blackberry smart phones, we were able to use this piece of technology effectively to communicate quickly with each other about our coursework project

 

We also created utilised the features of BlackBerry Messenger by creating a group just for members of our coursework project, this where we had conversations about our coursework and held meetings of the tasks we need to complete



Evaluation:Titilope

An Image Of 'Final Cut Pro.'


We used ‘Final Cut Pro’ for the editing of our trailer. As nobody in our group knew how to use this software, we all had to take time out of lessons or whenever we were free to watch tutorials on YouTube. We also aimed for the shots in our trailer to flow so our audience can easily recognise the genre of the trailer. We aimed to meet the conventions of a ‘psychological’ horror movie. These conventions are as follows:

·         Reality

·         Perception – Other characters should be observing or have observed the behaviours of the ‘antagonist’

·         Mind

·         Existence – The true purpose of the character.

·         Identity - Usually, the ‘antagonist’ will find the true identity/the devil side of his or herself. The loss of ‘innocence’.

·         Death - How / when the victims die.

We used ‘Photoshop’ to create the captions in our trailer. From ‘Photoshop’, we then imported the captions into the timeline on ‘Final Cut Pro’. We also downloaded fonts from ‘DaFont’ this was to create the effect we wanted our audience to get from the captions in the trailer. In our group, we created our music collectively.

An Image Of Photoshop.

An Image Of 'DaFont.'

We all added in things that we had created separately. However, we didn’t realise using the nursery rhyme tune “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” was an infringement; but we corrected it by cutting that bit of the sound by 10 seconds.

We didn’t record any other sound effects because we didn’t think the use of Foley sounds would be needed create the feelings we want from our target audience. We also used video technologies such as ‘Slow mode’ and ‘The Black White Effect’. We didn’t put so many effects in our teaser because, part of our research of psychological horror included watching psychological teasers and they didn’t contain so many effects, although they still carried the message along.

Our trailer also includes cuts, pacings and transitions because we wanted the trailer to be simplistic however, it will still carry the message along to our audience. We used social media sites such as ‘YouTube’ and ‘Facebook’ for the distribution of our trailer and many other videos that were filmed during the process of the production of our trailer. From these sites, we received comments from outside viewers.

Image Of Facebook's Logo.

These comments were to enable us to know if our trailer was effective or if it wasn’t and why. This was also the most efficient way of distributing our audience’s thoughts and comments instead of printing questionnaires and having to search for the age range we are targeting and also taking them to watch the trailer first.

Image Of Youtube's Logo.

We also feel that using this method enabled us to get valid information from our viewers (ages 15-20) as it isn’t a questionnaire so they wouldn’t feel so impatient whilst saying their thoughts or comments (a questionnaire doesn’t allow them to do that).

An Example Of A Psychological Horror Movie
:"The Uninvited."