Media Studies Q4 Evaluation

1. E V A L U A T I O N Q U E S T I O N 4
How did you use media technologies in
the construction and research, planning
and evaluation stages?

2. Internet
I used the Internet as a constant source
of information for my research. It was
very helpful in giving me tips on what to
research and what genres there are. My
research was influenced by other media
blogs, and writings on the Internet that
described what they had researched.
I used websites like Vimeo and YouTube
to research film trailers before deciding
to use the horror genre for my trailer. I
had used YouTube previously and so was
easy for me to navigate, however I and
never used Vimeo before and it was
difficult for me at first to view each video
without accidentally clicking on an
unwanted video or exiting the viewer.
I also used social media to get audience
feedback during the planning stages and
for my evaluation. I got polls from sites like
survey monkey and asked for comments
and criticism on Facebook, Tumblr and
Twitter.

3. Weebly
I used my Weebly blog as away of uploading
my research and keeping it in a safe place to
look at and use later. Because there was so
much information researched it was difficult
to keep a track of everything I had found and
wanted to use. Luckily I figured out how to
create a blog page on Weebly and how to use
the tags on that page. These tags organised
the information for me, creating a running
archive of all my research and that really
helped me in my planning stages when I had
to refer back for information.
My Weebly blog – Has all of
my research and planning and
final products and drafts on it.
It was relatively easy to use,
because I used it last year for
AS. However Weebly as a
website does have it’s
downfalls, it has some images
and links it cannot support and
therefore hinders my work and
makes me lose time by having
to upload things at home, or
makes me have to work out
another way to upload
information.

4. Uploading
I used websites like Slide Share and Prezi to
upload information for my research, planning and
evaluation stages. They are simple programs,
pretty easy to use. However it had been a while
since I last used Prezi (last year for AS) and so I
had to spend some time getting use to the design
and layout again. This did not take long
fortunately and I was able to upload all the
information I wanted quickly and easily.
Slide Share even had transcripts of the
information in case the slideshow didn’t load,
which was useful at school because sometimes the
software would crash, and instead of wasting time
reloading the page I could just read off the
transcript.
Prezi was very easy to use, it has
simple editing and a help button
if something crashed or stopped
working. There were many
online guides to help navigate
and use prezi.
Prezi lets you put up information in certain outlines, like
boxes and circles, and I also worked out how to ‘edit path’,
so that during the presentation, the way each ‘box’ was
presented can be changed. The order they are shown can
be easily changed and saved.

5. Construction
iMovie – Never used before, created many drafts before I could get to the real thing. I
didn’t use this software last year so I had never used it before. The timescale was hard,
because working out how to use it took a very long time and I had little time left, just
over two months, to edit the real footage into my final trailer.
Photoshop – Used last year so was familiar with this software and could use it to change
and edit the photographs quickly, however they were not on any computers at school so
this could only be done at home, which was annoying if I needed to use Photoshop and
iMovie at the same time alongside each other to influence the trailer and poster and give
them a similar colour scheme, because I don’t have a MAC computer at home.

6. Microsoft
Microsoft Software – I used Microsoft
word, and PowerPoint to create different
fonts and to crop images. These are
simple and easy software and I had a
quick time using them. They cropped
images that I later properly edited in
Photoshop at home, but Photoshop has a
bad habit of cropping badly, or being
difficult to crop images or remove a
background. I found that if I had already
done that step in PowerPoint it was far
easier for me.

7. Camera
Camera – I used my own Samsung Digimax i6 to film for my trailer. This was
simple for me because I already knew how to use it. However it did slow down my
work at times because I lost the wire that connects it to my computer to get the
images off. This meant I could only get the images and film off on a computer that
had an SD card slot, and while we were luckily using the MAC computers, from
time to time we could not and I was incapable of uploading anything from the
camera.