Evaluation Question 4How did you use media technologies in the

construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Sony Vegas is the name of the program that I used to edit all of my film. I chose to use it as I have used it a lot in the past and so was already confident using it. It allowed me to edit the film quickly and easily without any limitations so I am pleased that I used it.

Sony Vegas

Photoshop Photoshop was the program that I decided to use to create

both my film review and film poster. It seemed like the obvious choice to me because it is perfect for making these type of products and I have used it a lot in the past so I knew I wouldn’t struggle with not knowing how to use it. I am pleased I did use it as it was very easy to create the ideas that I had in mind. It has very in depth photo editing options as well as good text features, which made it a lot easier as I could do everything in the same program.

The cameras that I used for all of my filming were the GoPro HD Hero 2 and the Panasonic Lumix FZ45. I used the Lumix for all of the normal shots and the GoPro for the POV shots as it comes with a head strap that makes it very easy to attach it to the actors head. I found that neither of the cameras performed particularly well in the low-light that I filmed in. In particular the GoPro struggled, as it has a much smaller light sensor being a small, mountable camera. This lead to some of the shots being very grainy, which made the film look unprofessional.

Cameras

Lighting

Unfortunately I didn’t have access to any lighting equipment to shoot my film with, so I had to try and find another source oflighting. I decided to use the built in torch from my phone as it issurprisingly bright and lights up a wide area. This helped me a lotduring the filming as without it the subject would have beenharder to see. For some of the shots the light was too bright and ruined the shot, so I found a good way to dim the torch whichwas to wrap a tissue around it. Although quite unorthodox I foundthis technique to be very effective and I am glad I used it.

I used blogger to create my blog which meant that I could conduct all of my research and planning online. This was very helpful as it meant I could access my work from any computer without having to keep it on a USB stick. It also has a lot of useful features such as being to create a poll which I used to ask my audience what they thought my film should be called. I found blogger easy to use as it is very simple to upload a post, and even go back and edit them after if you want to change something.

Blogger

I chose YouTube as the website to use to upload all of the videos that I posted on my blog. The reason that I chose YouTube over another video sharing website like Vimeo is because it allows me to upload in HD which means that I can retain the same quality of my film even after uploading it, and it has easy embed features which made it easy to put them into my blog posts.

YouTube

These two websites helped me a lot to create my ancillaries as well as the main product. Dafont was crucial to me whilst making the poster and film review as it allowed me to find a wide range of professional fonts that you cant find on the computer by default. An example of a font I used from the website is ‘The Game’ on the poster which I found by searching for horror. If I had just used the default fonts both products would have looked a lot less professional and generally less exciting.

Dafont.com

Freesound is a website where users can upload a sound and then other users can download it for free. There is a very wide range of sounds available on the website, ranging from recordings of storms to gunshots, however I mostly just used it for the monster sound effects as well as some other scary effects to help create the horror atmosphere.

Freesound.org

Wordle helped me a lot during the research process. It allowed me to creatively brainstorm all of my ideas to make it more interesting to look at than just a normal list of words. Wordle has also helped greatly during the evaluation process, as I have been making one at the start of the question to get me thinking about all of the different areas of the question and it helps me to roughly plan what I am going to talk about in my answer. I also think that it looks quite good to whoever is reading my blog as they can see roughly what the answer is going to be about without actually reading the whole post.

Wordle

In conclusion, I used a very wide range of media technologies during the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of creating my products. Each form of technology helped me in different ways and in different parts of the process.

Conclusion