My answer to the evaluation question How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

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

2. New media technology has been used throughout the whole process of this project. Technology has made things much more easier to organise and distribute and research then every before. During research we found ourselves using websites like YouTube and Apple Trailers to check out all the different horror trailers. We used this to help get an understanding on how and why things are done, to check the conventions of a horror trailer. To help us replicate this when it came to making our own trailer. This was a lot easier for A2 being able to research using the likes of YouTube as it basically had everything that we needed however in AS it took a long time to search through for research material. Research Phase

3. Research & Planning Using Blogger has been a useful in compiling all our research. The groups blog is filled with pre-production research, this meant that if anyone missed anything due to sickness or at one point during our project exams, no-one was ever left behind due to the easiness and flexibility of using Blogger. It also meant that people could add to existing ideas and then we could achieve something a lot greater with 4 people input opposed to ones. Although we used a similar format for AS, due to the emphasis on new media technology from the start and the total digital hand in, Blogger has been used for a lot more posts. With the ability to embed YouTube videos its also been helpful in presenting our findings with links to the evidence itself. Which we used to plan what we were going to achieve week by week.

4. Construction For the construction of the trailer we used iMovie to organise and cut all the scenes from the footage we recorded using video cameras. We had some problems in the early stages where none of us had any real experience with using this software before, and on the second lesson due to a storage problem we had lost all our movie work. This however was easily recovered due to it being so early in the project, it also taught us a valuable lesson about the importance of backups. For the filming of the project we used a standard hand-held camera, although in the final scene we used my iPod touch to help integrate the use of modern technology. This meant that we could film using the camera Alex watching the torture scene to help give the sense of realism within the trailer.

5. Construction Continued While creating our ancillary texts one of the most useful programs that we also used last year was Adobe Photoshop. Its one of the industry standard tools that can help create professional looking images. Its also really handy with the use of layers to help you manipulate photos. This was key in both my magazine photo creation and my poster. Another program that we continued to use this year was InDesign, similar to Photoshop its an industry standard program that is great for producing the finished magazine and poster. Due to it being Adobe like Photoshop, it meant that photos were very easy to transfer after manipulation.

6. Evaluation Facebook was a great asset to use for communicating during this project, myself and Kathryn used it regularly to pass feedback to each other about our designs and ideas. It especially helped to get an outside perspective because after a couple of hours looking at your own work you need a fresh pair of eyes to make sure what you are doing is going to turn out ok for your audience. We used YouTube to help receive feedback from the comments. Unfortunately due to the large base of videos we were only fortunate to receive 2 comments but it was still useful to get an outside perspective.