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

2. Our
Equipment
Our production would not have been anything without these three key pieces of
equipment, they where the vital elements in the construction of out film. The
camera we had access to this year was DV rather than Hi8 (our camera provided
for AS year) which made getting our footage onto the computer a far easier
process than it was previously. Having our footage on SD cards also meant we
could speedily surf through different clips rather than being forced to save every
piece of test footage that would be totally unusable.
The tripod was again essential as it gave is the means to create smooth,
professional shots, which helped to give the production a more professional feel.
Perhaps one of the more consequential pieces of equipment for this years
production was the voice recorder. In order to tie our entire production together
we needed a very smooth voice-over which eased the transition from scene to
scene. Due to the fact that documentaries are forced to deliver a lot of
information in a short space of time means that the voice-over is a key feature.
Without the voice recorder our entire production would have made less than no
sense.

3. In terms of blogging sights, Wordpress was the best choice for this style of multi-modal blog.
Alternative more “social” blogs such as ‘Tumblr’ would not have been able to present the information
we needed to convey in the blogs in such a slick professional way. Wordpress offers a simple layout
where the dashboard section provides an extremely easy way of adding new posts as well as
manipulating work you have already posted. Embedding videos and slides as well as adding links and
pictures is an extremely easy process, and it is quick and convenient to make every post varied.
Being able to back-date posts was also a massively helpful feature as open our work was not posted
or completed in the correct order therefore back-dating it made our blog look far more fluid.

4. YouTube was a vital tool when it came to researching relevant documentaries and reality shows that could provide a basis for our
work. Buddhism was a topic that could have been extremely hard to find relevant T.V material, but thanks to the vast backlog of
videos available to us we were able to find approaches to Buddhism that were both extremely serious in their content and also
ones that were much more light hearted. Due to this vast range of footage available we could cherry-pick the best parts of each
style for documentary. Also the availability of full episodes of ‘Worlds Strictest Parents’ and Dawn Porters ‘Super Slim Me’ meant
we were able to gain a picture of how entire documentaries and culture clash shows came together. Also seeing as our
documentary was supposed to be a hybrid of both, these full shows were completely crucial in constructing a picture of how our
final 5 minute piece might look.

5. Premier
Elements Premier Elements has perhaps been the
most essential piece of new media
technology that we utilised. This video
editing software was the reason we were
able to make our film come together. In our
AS year, the video effects and transitions
saved our project completely and it has
very much been the case in our A2 year.
Titles, transitions (our mots used being the
‘fade to black’) were all extremely effective
in making our documentary feel like a
polished television worthy production. The
software was very easy to use and it was
very straightforward to input and
manipulate footage. Premier was a
massive step up from the apple software
that we were originally trained on and it
made video editing enjoyable rather than a
task.

6. Slideshare has been an extremely beneficial
tool in our research and evaluation stages of
our project. Slideshare provides a service
that lets you convert windows PowerPoint
presentations into embeddable web slide-
shows. It was through Slideshare that we
were able to start our project and our blog
due to the fact that it provided us the tool to
create our first post. The ‘Oh Danny Boy’
plan was created as a PowerPoint
presentation because of its easy readability
and aid in demonstrations. In order to
convert it into a web friendly format,
Slideshare was invaluable. Slideshare was
an extremely easy service to use in terms of
both conversion and embedding. As a group
our only trouble with the site, or rather
minor annoyance, was the fact that
converted PowerPoint's cannot be retrieved
and put back into their original windows
format. We unfortunately lost some of our
‘Oh Danny Boy’ presentation, and it would
have saved us considerable time had we
been able to attain it in it’s un-converted
form.

7. Viemo was the video
conversion website
which enabled us to
take our work from
the edited versions
saved in various
formats from premier
elements and convert
it into embeddable
web files.
Vimeo has been an indispensable tool when it comes to the construction and evaluation stages of our project. Vimeo was the only
medium for which we could get our edited footage on the internet. Without this site, there would have been no way we could have
posted our initial drafts of ‘Oh Danny Boy’ on the internet and gotten audience feedback. Vimeo was familiar technology to our
group as it was the same conversion program that we utilised in our AS year. Despite this familiarity, there were still
complications when it came to embedding videos into the wordpress blog; the instructions available on search engines were not
correct. In spite of this small insignificance, the answer was easily found when opening our previous Vimeo projects and checking
the embedding codes used for them. Vimeo was a key technology when it came to making our blog multi-modal, without it, none
of our finished videos would be available for public consumption.