1. Evaluation Q4
How did you use media technologies in the
construction, research and planning, and evaluation
stages?
2. Research and Planning
During the research and planning stages of our media production we near
exclusively used the internet to gather relevant information. A lot of the
inspiration we gathered was by watching other Psychological Thrillers on
YouTube, as well as finding good examples of other A2 Media Studies work.
This gave us more practical examples of Codes and Conventions of a
psychological thriller, something else that we looked up, using other
presentations and information pages previously created and gathering their
information, allowing for us to create our own codes and conventions
which we feel best fit the psychological thriller genre. By doing this it also
allowed for us to discuss a way to put our own twist on the genre, thus
defying the previously set out codes and conventions and making for a
product more appealing to our audience.
By using the internet to look up the codes and conventions of both posters
and film reviews relating to psychological thrillers we gained a better
understanding of what we were looking for. Because of the ability to access
the internet on our phone we could have near constant access to this
information, especially when combined with Blogger. By creating blogs on
Blogger it allowed us to store our gathered information, meaning we always
had easy access to anything we had previously put on there.
3. Construction Stage
During the construction stage we used multiple forms of editing
software, primarily focusing on Final Cut Pro for our video editing and
then using Photoshop to deal with our images.
Final Cut Pro on the Mac allowed for us to have easy access to a lot of
professional looking video effects as well as an easy to understand UI,
meaning that although we were unfamiliar with
editing using the program we could still do it to
a reasonable level. The access to multiple visual
effects also turned out to be extremely useful as
it meant we could simply apply a filter to our
footage and give it a black and white or
greyscale look.
4. Construction Stage Cont.
We used Adobe Photoshop when sorting out our film poster and review
page. We were familiar with Photoshop due to the tutorials we had both
watched online and had in person assistance, meaning that it was easy
for us to sort out what we needed as well as keep our images at a
professional standard while editing them.
Similar to Final Cut, Photoshop has a very
user friendly UI and takes very little under-
standing to use the tools correctly. Again, it
allowed for us to easily apply professional
looking effects, thus keeping our images at a
high quality. Importing images into Photoshop
for use was also extremely easy and took little
to no time to edit.
5. Construction Stage Cont.
When it came to the actual hardware we used during filming we used
mainly a Cannon 400D. Although the location scouting images were
taken on a smartphone, the rest of the images and footage were done
using a camera. We did not use a tripod or lighting during the main
chunk of our filming, mainly relying on natural light and a camera
frame to keep our footage steady.
We still used YouTube during the
construction stage as it allowed for
us to find music that was useable in
our piece. YouTube not only provides
access to tons of videos, but also can
be used to look up music that may not otherwise be found on a majority
of mainstream music sites.
6. Evaluation and Conclusion
For our evaluation we used a combination of PowerPoint and Prezi to
record our answers to the evaluation questions. Prezi allowed for
instant recording of the answer online, however PowerPoint did not
provide the same instant online upload. This meant
that in order to put our presentation online we used
SlideShare, creating an online version of the presen-
tation which we could link to our blogs for access
later.
To conclude we used a variety of media technologies throughout the
creation of our main piece as well as our two ancillary tasks. Using
Blogger as a way to access the information we had as well as store any
useful links was a good decision as it meant we did not have to worry
about any cloud storage to transfer images or video links between our
group.
