1. How did you use new media technologies in the construction,
research, planning and evaluation stages? By Sharon Uyinmwen
Throughout the various stages of pre production, production and post
production of my coursework there were various new media technologies I incorporated,
however, it was the combination of using each new technology (technological convergence)
that helped improve my final product.
In terms of new technologies, the creation process started from the blog. The blog
was my blank slate in order to present my creative ideas towards the film that
we would be creating, having said this, it was the use of the internet and the various tools in
which it provided that helped me in the development of my blog. For example, for film
research I used various search engines such as www.google.co.uk and www.yahoo.co.uk in
order to find information that I needed to assist me with this task.
The reason as to why I decided to use search engines was because my knowledge on
Silent films were very limited before doing this task, and using the internet could therefore
help broaden my knowledge before tackling the task. Search engines were useful as they
provided me with different website links in order for me to read up on information I needed.
Google then lead me to www.youtube.com where I could watch examples of film clips that I
would not have been able to have access to over wise. For the presentation of my blog to be
more user friendly and eye-catching, I needed to find different ways of presenting work on
my blog. One example of a way of doing this was with www.scribd.com.
With Scribd I could automatically upload work pieces that I created on Microsoft
PowerPoint or Microsoft Word into a compatible format for my blog. This meant that anyone
viewing my work would have the option of viewing it in a full screen and would be able to
scroll from page to page. This was useful as it made the presentation of my blog start to look
more professional. The use of Canon still cameras also assisted me with my research as I used
them for various Cinematography tasks I did. With the camera I was able to take and
experiment with taking different pictures from different positions and angles. Using the
Canon stills benefited me as they were very small and lightweight, so I could put them in very
confined places in order to get different shots. I could also change colour filters to
correspond with the type of film we were going to be making which was in black and
white.
After the research process of my coursework I could then look at the work I had on
my blog and start to put together story ideas known as treatments. Once these treatments
were published it was the use of the comment boxes that enabled me and my group to take on
feedback to then develop our ideas.
Once our ideas had been developed
Comment Box
and finalised we could then move on
to creating, storyboards and scripts
and it was the use of new technologies
that helped us with this.
For example, when we had our final storyboard drawn out, we used a scanner to transfer the
paper based version to an electronic format (jpeg).I could then upload it on to my blog. I found
that scanning and converting our storyboard into an image meant that I could then use Kizoa;

2. which is an online application in which you can present images and documents incorporating
text and sound if necessary. Once again it was the combining of software and the internet that
helped improve the presentation of my blog. We used Canon still cameras once again to
create the photo storyboard for our film. I knew however that If I were to put the pictures
onto my blog there would have been various limitations, such as anyone viewing my
blog would only be able to see them at a certain size and would have to click on each image
one at a time in order to view them. So, with this in mind I put the images onto a
PowerPoint presentation and then uploaded them onto Slideshare. Slideshare then
provided me with an embed code which I could then copy and
paste on to the blog under the edit HTML option. This method solved
the limitation issues as viewers could view my pictures on a full screen and browse through
them by simply clicking on an arrow. I used www.glogster.com to annotate my final script
and to present the location issues. Using Glogster was a good way of making more innovative
designs to present various pieces of work and added more depth to my Blog.
During the construction of our film we had the technologies of the Canon XHA1 camera to
use. The use of the camera enabled us to record our film in various different locations as the
Tripod it came with was easy to take down and set up from location to location. It was also
very simple to use because of previous experience learnt in AS. The camera also allowed us to
be more creative with shots as we could attach the tripod to tracks to capture more movement
in scenes. The camera also allowed us to attach a microphone and boom pole in order to
capture sound. Once we recorded the footage we needed we could then digitise our shots
onto Adobe Premier Pro for editing. We had to attach the Firewire lead from the camera to
the computer Hardrive. Adobe Premier Pro was the editing program that we used, after
digitising shots we could use the tools to cut and order our shots. And had various special
effects that we could add to improve our film. This improved the production value of our film
as rather than having to incorporate the special effects during filming we could do them
in editing.
Having said this Adobe did come with its limitations as there was a limit to the type of effects
we could use. It also had a tendency to run very slowly after being used for a long amount of
time, so luckily to stop us loosing work adobe has an automatic save system which saved our
work onto our Lacie at intervals of time. Were had our film saved on a Lacie drive. This
benefited us as rather than saving it on the computer we were working on we had it on a
portable device meaning we could edit on any computer that had Adobe Premier pro installed
on it. In addition rather than using sound effects on set Adobe Premier Pro allowed us to
import them onto the timeline during the editing process if the film.
When creating my ancillary texts I used Microsoft word for my film review and
started off by using paint for my film poster. However, when creating my film poster I found
that Paint was very limited in the tools it had for me to edit my pictures with, that I had taken
using the Canon stills. So, an alterative was Photoshop. Using Photoshop enabled to add the
desired effects to the text and pictures that I wanted which improved my final product. At
first I was not familiar with Photoshop but it was during the creation of the draft ancillary
posters that helped improve my skills of using Photoshop. I found that creating both ancillary
texts online rather than on paper was a better method as I could make simple and basic
changes if I didn’t like the look of something, also, my drawing skills are not very good so
using photographs and texts made my ancillary task more successful.
This is very similar to creating my evaluation as rather than having to write it using a
paper based methods I can use Microsoft word. Microsoft word will allow me to save my
evaluation and come back to make changes when necessary. I can also change and edit fonts to

3. my preference. And once I have finalised my evaluation I can have it converted into a format
to which I can then upload onto my blog.
To conclude I have used various new media technologies and the combination of
these technologies helped present my work in the best way possible.