Storytelling, Ethics and Workflow in Documentary Photography
A2 q3
1. How did you use media technologies in the
construction, research, planning and evaluation
stages?
2. New Video Cameras
To film our video, we used new state of the art video cameras, which used memory
cards to store our footage in a digital format, making the transferring of our footage
and photos onto the editing machines more efficient.
We used a Canon 600D to film our video, a tripod, and artificial lighting in order to
create high quality footage.
Also, these SLR cameras are now more common to use in low budget film
production because of the high quality image capture and also the high quality of the
lenses they offer.
Our images were taken on a SLR camera also, allowing us to examine the quality
while on the photoshoot, this helped us gain higher quality images as we could
change the settings to create a more fitting image.
3. Blogger
To make a home for my research, planning, construction and evaluation I used Blogger. This was
an easy way to display my journey of creating my video and digipack.
Blogger allowed me to embed all different types of digital technology in order to display my work in
a more creative way.
Also, the blogger app allowed me to check my blog on the move, allowing me to constantly be
aware of what work was finished and what work wasn’t.
4. Benefits of using Blogger.
Blogger includes a sidebar
which allowed us to flick
quickly from post to post,
and easily see our progress.
Blogger also allowed us to view all
of our posts, and it labelled which
ones were drafts and which ones
were not, enabling us to keep up to
date with what our teacher could
mark and give us feedback on and
what they couldn’t.
Blogger allowed us to
label our posts,
keeping all research,
planning etc together.
Also, this toolbar
allowed us to click onto
each section of our
advanced portfolio and
see the progress from
research, and planning
all the way to our final
construction.
5. Displaying my work
I used many different websites to help display my work. Some examples are:
Prezi: This allowed me to display my work in the most creative way, with
transitions to every part of my work.
Voki: This allowed me to show an interactive/moving representation of my
audience.
Google Drive: I used this to store all of my powerpoints and word documents, and
as it has a constant saving feature, I lost no work therefore making my research
planning and evaluation more secure and efficient.
6. Internet
The internet played a large role in my research planning and evaluation. For
example YouTube allowed us to research similar music videos, and gather
conventions from them which would improve the quality of our video.
YouGov also allowed us to gather information of our target audience, allowing us
to know how to target our audience.
Also, the internet enabled us to keep in contact with our teachers, for example the
use of Twitter and Emails kept us up to date, and gave us the opportunity to
enquire about how to improve.
7. Premiere Pro
To edit our music video my group used Adobe Premiere Pro. This worked well as
we had previous knowledge of the software from our AS project. We used many
features of Premiere Pro to edit our video, such as cut, change of speed, and
visual effects. We changed our narrative video image to black and white, to focus
on the meaning, and this went well with our slow paced song.
8. Photoshop: DigiPack
To create our ancillary products we used latest version of Adobe Photoshop. This
enabled us to create high quality products, which appealed well to our audience. To
make our products link well, we used photoshop to duplicate the colours, effects and
more onto each product. This in result making our artist more recognisable due to our
attention to continuity, and become a brand.
Each photo was edited separately, making sure we could have images which were
well toned, for example we blended/smoothed the grey colour in order to create a
smoother picture, with no sharp differences in colour. This lead to a higher quality in
image, and also was more aesthetically pleasing to our audience.
9. Photoshop: Advert
Again, we used photoshop to edit and create our advert. We edited the image itself separately,
using tools such as a photo filter. We used the cooling filter, this made our image appear more
blue, and calm which is good as it links well to our genre which a lot of the time is based on
sadness, and loneliness.
Within photoshop we also used text, to give our image of the artist a name a brand. We used a
text which we thought appealed to the audience, as it was simple, however a little different, this in
result gave our ancillary products some character which many Indie artists have.
We cropped the image to an A4 size, this was so that it could be advertised in magazines, and
also used as posters in order to reach our audience.
Furthermore, photoshop allowed us to add logos of other technologies which our audience could
use to find our artist, this making our advert more well rounded and appealing.