1. Evaluation Question 4 – How did you use media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?
R and D
I used the Internet to research theory and the conventions typical of the product
I was making. We referred to websites such as Short of the week and Art of the
Title to help us choose which genre to select and to begin to brainstorm and
construct a story line. However, since the Internet is so vast and there are so
many different sources to find out information from we used Youtube to watch
the recommendations of the websites’ short films and movie trailers that were
relevant to my teen drama genre. I watched the trailers for films including: Wild
Child and Mean girls. Although it might have been useful to make an animatic for
our final piece we found our time was best spent doing further research on
Pintrest and Facebook. Using these social websites we searched for different
shoot location ideas on Pintrest and potential actors on Facebook. Additionally
these sharing platforms helped us to gain a deeper insight into our target
audience and gave us inspiration for the events/climax that we might feature in
our short film.
To help in our stages of pre production all of the crew had mobiles and laptops
on us at all times so that we could communicate and work on the various
locations sets. Using Blogger we stored our timetable for shooting, list of props,
storyboards and scripts to stay on task. We went online to find a template for our
story boards and then hand drew these scene; taking photos to upload onto the
internet for everyone’s reference. Which we then created a shot list off of. Before
we finalised this we used Celt ex to finalise our scripts – producing script break
down to help make the process quicker. To assist in costume organisation and
continuity we used Microsoft Excel tables for each character and each scene.
Tumbler was used as alternate form of recording our updates and keeping track
of our progress as one of our crew preferred to use this technology. Throughout
the whole process one of the most useful technologies I used was Slideshare to
import all of my information onto my Blogger account in a common format.
Production: When it came to filming, instead of using our school camera’s we
went to a rental company to use a more professional DSLR camera. We used a
Tascam to ensure smooth transitions in shots and a tripod to keep our screen
stable. As for sound we used Dig mic to create a great sound quality with a boom
for extra background noise to make the piece more authentic.
In post production we used Final cut pro to edit our film and take our recorded
footage and reduce it down to our time set in the brief which was 5 minutes.
Using different features of the software such as changing colour concentrations,
music fade in, corrections to continuity and our use of text phrases popping up
on screen really made us familiar with the software. We used InDesign to help
create our poster and magazine cut out which I was really proud of because of its
professional finish. I think this has been the best use of the skills that I have
2. learnt during my media studies because I was able to apply my research and
theory with my creative vision. We also used Photoshop to edit the pictures
featured in the magazine and poster to crop and increase the contrast of the
images; giving them a stylised and smooth finish. In order to create our
evaluation questions we used Prezi instead of Powerpoint for ease of access as it
is available online. Prezi allowed us to present our evaluation questions in a
more engaging format for our audience.
Evaluation intro
Talk about technologies and procumers, talk about we media and
participatory culture.
The production of media has become democratised
Do something extra on celtx
Post production- editing, poster, magazine
Question 1A in exam startsthe same way evaluation 4 starts
