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

During the four main stages of our assignment we used Media technology such as the Internet, cameras and software to help us to create a well rounded product. For the research aspect of our product we used the Internet and looked on such websites as YouTube and IMDb to get inspiration for our film trailer by looking at other media products of the same genre such as the TV show Life on Mars which is a fictional drama set in the late 1970s early 80s we also looked at police action films based in the 1980s such as Starsky and Hutch and Lethal Weapon. I also used Wikipedia to research directors as this is the role I played off set. This helped me to understand what the job entails and gather inspiration from directors such as Mike Leigh and Neil Armfield.

For the planning stage we used Microsoft word to plan out our scenes and I used this to create a running order for our scenes and to help us manage our time effectively. We also used a Sanyo xacti cam-corder to take pictures of the area and locations we may want to film in so that we could refer to these when deciding where to position each scene and how effective the setting would be.

For the construction stage we used an editing programme called Sony Vegas to edit our film and add in effects such as explosions and text. We also used an Olympus digital camera to take pictures of characters and the car for the poster and magazine cover. These were then edited on adobe Photoshop and on word where I added in text boxes to make the magazine cover look more professional. I also used an animation programme called serif draw plus to create two animated title sequences for our film and then converted them to gif files using a file converter. We also had to pick out a font for our title and download this to a word processor to use in the trailer, magazine cover and poster.

In the evaluation process we used a Sanyo xacti cam-corder to film these video entries. We also used blogger to document all of our work and we used windows paint to edit together screenshots of our film to use as another visual reference. We also added these to the final storyboard to give it a more finished and professional look. these helped us to plan out our evaluations.