Q4) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

There are many ways in which I have used media technologies to aid the production of my media texts. For the magazine front cover production and the poster I used mainly Microsoft publisher to put together the page because its features are easy to understand and fairly time effective. However for image manipulation I used adobe photoshop, this is because I required filters and certain manipulation features that were not available on publisher. For the creation of our trailer I used serif movie plus because it enabled us to edit our footage fairly easily.

As a way to plan and brainstorm as a group, we created a facebook group in order to share ideas and information. It also acted as an aid to organise cast and crew for filming dates.

When conducting our audience research i used the site questionpro to create a questionnaire.

After creating a 20 question survey we distributed it using social media sites such as facebook, twitter, blackberry messenger etc. the use of these sites proved very useful as we reached a large amount of respondants in the period of around a week.

 When i received my results, i decided to present them in a more aesthetically pleasing way, in order to this i entered the data into Microsoft Excel's chart wizard.





 This is the chart wizard, it allowed me to chose what type of graph to display my data in, it also has features to enable you to rename sections of the chart and recolour them.
The type of chart i used depended on what type of data i had collected. for example for questions where there was a larger range of responses I may have chosen to use a bar chart as it would have been more difficult to interpret a wide range of information of a pie chart or something similar.



When researching and analysing existing texts 'Google' proved to be very useful. using the 'advanced search' feature i was able to segregated the information i needed to aid my construction. Using 'Youtube' i found trailers for films such as 'Dead Mans Shoes' and 'The Shining'. The fact i was lucky enough to have access to these platforms means that i was able to put together my research fairly quickly whereas before the times of the internet i would of had to conduct research using local library facilities which would have taken much longer.

Adobe photoshop is a more professional software and requires time and patience in order to get the outcome expected. As a class we faced difficulties with the soft wares used such as adobe photoshop and serif movie plus due to the capacity of the hardware and the servers being very slow. However after many attempts I was finally able to create 3 professional standard media texts.

One of the main images I had to manipulate was the main typography of our film. 'Eve' is written in what can be seen as a 'chalk on blackboard' style. This reflects that our film is about a child. In order to create this image we used the site 'Dafont.com' and chose and appropriate font then print screened the page and isolated the title we created. Then we opened the isolated title image in adobe photoshop and used a feature that made the image negative. So instead of black writing on a white background we now had white writing on a black background. This meant some of the writing outline appeared pixelated so in order to fix this I erased the outline pixel by pixel using the eraser tool until I gained the desired finish.

Then, to give more of a sense of the genre i created a blood red shadow of the typography by copying the image then rotating and stretching it at the required angle. The effect of this is that the white innocence has a reflection of red evil and danger essentially.

When creating our trailer i used Serif Movie Plus. This proved to have its issues as our school computers did not have a wide enough capacity for it to run smoothly. Although we could drag clips onto the timeline easily and put together sequences well. it was difficult to playback what we had edited as it seemed 'jittery' and we could not get a clear idea of the pace of the trailer till we had exported the file and watched it using windows media player. However, Serif Movie Plus is an excellent choice for editing purposes as it is fairly easy to get to grips with and there are many good features we used in order to get our trailer to a good standard. Within our trailers there are shots that are black and white, this was done by clicking the required shot then going to effects and dragging 'Grayscale' onto the shot. We also sped up and slowed down shots by going to properties and typing in how much faster or slower we needed the running time to be. We also discovered by overlapping shots on the timeline it created a 'fade' effect and we could blend shots into each other as well as fade them in or out.

One of the main technologies we used was of course the film cameras. This required some preparation time in order to assure that each member of our group was familiar with things like how to change the focus and iris of the camera, how to set up the white-balance, and how to check that the audio is working.