1. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

3. The first type of technology we used, and one that we found increasingly helpful throughout the whole process, was the internet. We initially used the internet to research the topic we had chosen and to develop a greater understanding of the conventions it carries, helping us to decide on a suitable target audience. We soon discovered that most projects with a similar topic to ours were aimed at middle aged women. As well as looking at documentaries of a similar topic we also looked at other forms of media revolving around the idea of the clairvoyant, such as horoscopes and online reading sites. We found that most sites that offered a horoscope like service were online magazine websites such as “Elle”, which were also aimed at young or middle aged women.

4. The internet became a valuable resource again when we were constructing our questionnaires as we made use of video streaming sites such as “Youtube”, to watch other documentaries of the same nature to see what aspects of the topic hadn’t been covered and what questions still remained unanswered. This stage of planning also helped ideas for the content of our piece itself to develop, as, as well as finding out what questions we could comprise in our survey we also gained a greater understanding of the house style of channel 4 documentaries; a very basic but effective style. We soon found that in order to maintain a worthy standard of Channel 4 and to stay true to their well known house style, we would have to constantly visit the Channel 4 documentary page.

5. As Warrington didn’t have many psychic nights or services to offer, we also used the internet to find psychics and clairvoyants in the area. We found a website listing all of the psychic readers within the area, we wrote down the numbers and addresses of the ones that interested us.

6. We used the site “Blogger” to store all of our media coursework and production diary’s.

7. During the AS year we were introduced to blogger when we had to keep a log of our production and write an evaluation after, after the first year of using it we were all used to it and found it very easy to work.

9. As well as the internet, we found that magazines also contained many different articles and sections related to the psychic realm. We read a variety of different magazines, men’s and women’s, but found that there was little mention of horoscopes in men’s magazines. Magazines such as “Heat”, “OK!” and “Elle” had made a weekly tribute to the idea of psychic's, including a horoscope styled section predicting the readers future via their star sign. As this was included every week in these women’s magazines it became obvious that it was something that interested them, and as it was not included in those that appeal better to men, it probably did not concern them.

11. The first time we made use of Microsoft Word was when developing the audience research questionnaires, it was easy to use with easily changeable fonts and the ability to create tables, or bullet point/number our questions.

12. As I was creating my blog I always typed my work up on Microsoft Word first and then copy and pasted it to Blogger.com as the spell check tool on Word is very useful and it also corrects any grammatical mistakes that I made making my work look tidier and more professional

14. First we used “Adobe Premier”. The first thing we did using this program was using basic cutting to clip the one long video file we had filmed, capturing smaller clips. As the sound quality in our piece was quite bad, premier gave us the ability to change the sound levels using an EQ balancer, we turned down the volume in certain parts so nothing was “peaking” and in other turned the audio up so it could be heard more clearly. We also used another effect called “demuffler” to get rid of the white noise we had in the background. Later on when we had cut all of our clips and put them into place we used premier to put transitions such as cross-fade on to make our piece run smoother. The program was very easy to use and was easy to navigate around.

15. During the construction of the print advert we also used the editing suite, but used a different program called “Adobe Photoshop”. This program was easy to use. We screen-shot the part of the documentary we wanted to take the image from, and then cropped it and turned it into a JPEG. As the image was large and we had to shrink the size of it, it was slightly pixilated, and it was hard to tell what it was. To fix this we used a “sharpener” on it to make the pixels sharpAgain and we then made it black and white to get rid of the smudges on the colour and put an effect on it to make it glow and look more mystical, supporting the theme of the piece. We was also able to filter the white background off the channel 4 ident logo and resize it easily so it blended in with the rest of our image.

17. - We used a program called “Ordasity” which I found easy to use, it was clearly indicated with a red button how to record your voiceovers and was easy to save them all as separate MP3 files ready to be imported to Premier.

18. - There was an mp3 sound equalizer which allowed us to change the sound levels if bits were louder than others using markers which we could drag up and down, this was an easy process.

19. - There was a sound board with buttons and switches that we could use to change the EQ, pitch and sound levels.

21. - The DV camera was of a high standard and have a built in MP3 microphone that we used for interviews in the radio room as it was quiet.

22. When filming the interview, and the vox-pops, as it was in a loud area such as the town centre we had to use a clip on microphone that we attached to the interviewee or member of the public so we could hear them above the ambience.

23. We used the camera to film our stock footage and cutaways, it was useful for this as we could either hand hold the camera to add a personal touch, or use a tripod so it would stay in one position. The tripods height was easily adjustable which was useful as many of our cutaways were on the interviewees table which was pretty low down but we wanted a straight on shot.

24. We also used a hand held camera to take pictures and videos of us filming to use as evidence for our blog, this was easy and convenient, when we didn’t have a camera at hand we also found that a camera built into a mobile phone was useful even if it wasn’t of the best quality. Archive Footage We used the “kiss” feature on Youtube to download clips, and then cut them into smaller files and clips. Youtube was convenient as it was easy to use and had a great amount of videos on our theme on it, it’s also something everybody in the group was familiar with outside of this project which was convenient. At first we planned to use some of these clips as stock footage but instead as the clips were of a high quality and easily built suspense we decided to make a title sequence out of these using effects such as “zoom” to make it more dramatic.