1. How did you use media
technologies in the construction
and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
By Ed Smith
2. Research
• To research films similar to ours, I got the majority of
information from the internet, one of the most useful
websites included YouTube. This enabled us to
research other films that were created by other A2
students, this meant we could tell what sort of films we
would be able to create with similar resources.
• During lesson time we used the Macs to research all
the information we needed as they were made
available to us and are easy to use, they were also
very quick and also effective for the evaluation stages.
3. Screenshot of a YouTube search I
did for other A2 thriller films.
4. Research Continued
• Whilst at home I tried to immerse myself in more
professional thriller films such as Inception and Seven,
these gave me a deeper insight into a more expert
level production which meant we had a high quality set
of films in which we could aspire to be like.
• The search engine Google was another useful
technology as we were able to search for anything we
needed, such as different camera shots. I found
Google very effective as I am used to using it so I
didn’t need to spend time getting to grips with it.
5. Research Continued
• Blogger proved to be extremely useful in research as
we wrote nearly all of our research on that. It was easy
for us to then keep track of changes and allow other
members to look at our collaborative research.
• I used Blogger as a diary to keep myself sure of what I
had done and when I had other tasks due in for. This
helped me to keep on top of my research and made
me keep to my deadlines.
6. Screenshot of my blog and some
of the posts in which I have
completed.
7. Research Continued
• We all used a variety of different
technologies to update progress and
organise meetings for more research
and planning. We used mobile phones
to communicate between one and
another but also we used the macs
nearly each lesson for updating
research.
• In addition I used my personal laptop
to carry out more research at home so
I could keep onto of my work and I
could also look into more films
whenever I wanted to.
8. Planning
• When planning our production we tried to be as
realistic as possible. We used technologies such as
YouTube to look at other films which gave us an idea
of what was possible.
• Blogger was useful as it allowed me to upload my
research and any information that was useful to the
group in terms of planning our project.
• Google was another technology I found useful for
planning because I could search common conventions
of thrillers and also different filming techniques which
we could then later use in our project.
9. Construction
• During the majority of our
construction, we used the Mac, we
used it to upload our filming so we
could see what we had done and
what we needed to complete. This
contained all the software we needed
such as iMovie.
• iMovie was the only program we
used for the construction of the film,
without this we would have found it a
lot harder to learn the syntax of a
new piece of software and the use of
iMovie helped us to create the high
quality production we finished with.
10. Construction
• Probably the most useful piece of hardware we used
was the camera provided by the school which turned
out to be very high quality. The video camera was very
useful for taking location shots which also helped in the
planning of our film.
• Without the camera we wouldn’t have been able to film
any of our film and we would have had to use the old
camera which were lower quality and we wouldn’t have
been able to produce such a high quality product.
11. Construction
• The camera was
provided and stored at
school which meant that
we didn’t need to
purchase it and due to
our limited budget this
was very useful. We also
never forgot it and could
charge it every day so it
was always on hand.
12. Evaluation
• During the evaluation stages of my production I used a
variety of different technologies such as powerpoint
and iMovie, I also used more specialised web
programs such as Wordle and Prezi, these multimedia
approaches give me a different way of presenting my
evaluative work.
• I tried to range the technologies I used so I could
approach my evaluations in the most creative way I
could. I considered using simple blog posts as they are
the easiest but then I thought over this again and
decided that the same evaluations in another form
would be much more effective.
