The student used a variety of media technologies in the planning, research, construction, and evaluation of their three media products. They used online platforms like YouTube and Iplayer to research documentaries, and Blogger to plan and organize their research collaboratively. They used familiar software like Excel, Word, and the camera features to conduct audience research and film interviews. During construction, they learned how to use new technologies like Apple Macs, Final Cut Express for editing, and Garage Band for their radio trailer. Overall, while some technologies took time to learn, they found the tools useful for producing high quality media products.

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

2. The production of all three of our media products meant for the use of a variety of technology. We began with the planning of our
products whereby we used technology which we were all familiar with. This included analysising tv documentaries through Iplayer
and youtube.
We then used blogger.com to upload all our research and planning, this helped us organise the research and see who needed to
do what, or what was missing in what areas. Most of our research and planning area involved us spiltting up and completing different
sections. Blogger.com also enabled us to scan in any hand written research we had done, for instance our initial ideas sheet. This
made planning easier for us as if we weren’t able to access a computer for any reason we knew that any work we did on paper could
be easily transferred onto the blog through the simple scanning system which is in place within the college. I found blogger.com
overall a really useful and simple site to use, allowing is to easily upload work without any instruction needed. We began our
planning by simply brainstorming ideas on what we wanted our documentary to be about, we wanted to explore a topic which we
were all interested in, this didn’t require any use of technology.
Once we had decided on the documentary idea, we did further research into the topic, including further analyse of documentaries
related to the topic we had chosen, research on news reports and facts and statistics into those who use social networking sites and
relevant crimes.
Further research we did involving the computer was our target audience, who do
we actually want our product to be aimed at? We needed to establish a target
audience in order to establish what research to do because we needed to know
what would appeal to our target audience. We knew an essential area of research
was to explore the TV and radio channels we were going to broadcast our
documentary and radio trailer on, as well as which magazine to publish our article.
In order to do this we firstly produced a questionnaire asking our target audience
what channel they would mostly watch, we had a good deal of debate on which
channel to broadcast our documentary, originally through audience and research I
undertook, we agreed BBC1 would be the best channel as this is the channel that
attracts our target audience the most and airs similar documentary programmes.
However we ended up broadcasting on bbc2 as it fits with the age range of our
target audience more appropriately. Our documentary falls into the style of public
affairs. These tend to be shown by public service broadcasting channels such as
BBC and explore current controversial affairs, in particular they draw attention to a
perceived and can have a significant impact on the audience. This is relevant to
our documentary as we are exploring idea of social networking and the riots, a
perceived wrong and current affair which got the country talking during the summer
months.

3. The audience research we produced involved the use of
excel so that we could produce graphs to make our data
more visually appealing, and word to actually produce our
questionnaire. This was software we were all familiar with,
so had no real difficulty here.
Example of the use
of scribd within our
blog.
Once most of the planning stage had been done, we noticed that the blog looked unorganised so an easy way to
resolve this was through the use of new technology known as slide share and scribd. None of us had used either
of these before so it was challenging and took us a while to familiarise ourselves with the software. However, we
did manage to establish how to use scribd so used this in situations whereby we had a lot of scanned in paper, so
for example the story board. It just made the blog look a lot neater and professional so overall was a useful piece
of software which allowed us to keep everything in one place and develop our IT skills even further.

4. Once all the initial research had been undertook on software which
we were familiar with, we were then introduced with the technology
we would be using for the actual construction of the documentary.
This included camcorder, tripod, headphones, and directional mics.
The equipment which was required to film our documentary was
at first challenging, we made a lot of mistakes to begin with therefore meaning we
had to redo various vox pops as the sound quality was not perfect. However, with practice the use
of the technology became easier.
The camcorders we used were cannon h920 which had a variety of different features which helped us record our footage to the
best standard possible. We were introduce to all the features of a camera by a member of staff before the production process
took place. After a just a brief period of using the camcorder, we were able to establish some of its features without referring to
any help guides. Its zoom button was placed at the top of the camera, its smooth zoom control meant that we were able
to make the zoom effect look as professional as possible in situations we considered appropriate, for example, we
zoomed in on the Solihull sixth form sign as part of the establishing shot to the college. We also had the option the take skill
images, this is a useful feature, which when reflecting back on our production and construction process I wish we used more as it
would of produced better quality, high resolution images as opposed to taking stills of the time line which turned out to be very
pixelated.
Through the use of the function button we had various filming modes which we were
allowed to select along with other options such as shooting modes, white balance and
image and digital effects. We didn’t use any of the effects available on the camera as
there was not a high enough range of possible effects which we believed to be
satisfactory compared to what was available within final cut. This meant that the post
production stage would take longer, however, in the long run it would be worth it to
ensure the documentary looked as professional as possible.
A convention on the camera which came in useful was the light settings including white
balance, this meant that we could set the camera appropriately so that clips did not turn
out to look orange or blue.
The use of tripods allowed us to make our recording portable, it also reduced the effect
of shaking camera which immediately suggests an amateur project. Similarly with the
mics, they allowed for the sound levels to be as clear as possible to again reduce the
idea of an amateur project.
I overall found the cannon camcorder, as well as all the other recording equipment reasonably easy to operate. The camcorder
sufficiently fulfilled my expectations and allowed for the production of well exposed high resolution recordings. As well as the
actual recording, the camcorders were on hard discs. This enabled us to simply export all footage from the camcorder straight
onto the mac. This was particularly convenient as it saved us a lot of time. Once exported, this allowed us to easily log and
transfer all footage required into final cut express. This was the beginning of our post-production.

5. The construction of our documentary involved the use of apple macs, similar to the
technology we used to record our documentary, none of us were really familiar with how
to use an apple mac so it therefore took some getting used too. Despite this, I was very
impressed with the macs. Having never used the software on them before I wasn’t sure
what to expect but I found that they produced a high quality clear cut project and
thought using the macs were a better option than using regular windows computers as it
allowed us to develop our skills. The macs are definitely something I would consider
using in the future if I was to produce another project similar to this one.
The apple imac has a variety of software which we were able to use during the
production of our documentary which is shown from the tool bar below.
Safari gives
fast, easy web Indesign and photoshop, used Garage band Final cut
browsing for the production of the which we used express which
magazine and photoshop for the we used for the
allowed us to resize and stills production of actual
we had taken from the timeline our radio production of our
to be used in our magazine . trailer. documentary.
Final cut was the software we used on the apple macs to produce our documentary. It is
an advanced video editing software which includes a variety of film-specific features
enabling us to produce a high quality documentary. As I said earlier, this software was new
for all 3 of us. Personally, it took me a while to familiarise myself with how to use final cut.
But I was soon able to recognize the basics before then developing my skills even further.

6. Below is the screen you get with final cut, which in fact has very useful features in enabling high quality production. The
features of final cut are futher explained on the following slides.
Browser, shows all Known as the viewer, Canvas, plays
the footage we have allows us to preview video from the
logged and footage time line
transferred
Used to control
sound levels
Tool bar, particularly useful
in terms of editing. Time line which shows us the
order of documentary, the time
This panel demonstrates the sound levels line can be stretched out to
which helped us see which needed seeing help position footage or make
too, i.e if sound levels entered the red amendments to voiceover in
section we knew they were distorted terms of fading in and out.

7. Final cut offers a wide range of features, but the first and most important stage is actually logging and transferring the
footage we had recorded from the cameras onto the mac itself. This was a fairly easy process, we named all the footage
appropriately, making it easier when it appeared in our browser. Once everything was logged and queued we were then able to
preview the footage, allowing us to distinguish what footage was successful and what footage was less successful so we could
then decide what we thought would work well in our documentary before transferring it into final cut and ultimately, into our
timeline.
The browser shows us all our footage which we had logged, queued and transferred.
As you can see, they are all appropriately named so that this makes the process of
transferring them to our timeline easier.
As already mentioned in the previous
slide, the black box to the left is known as
the viewer, as the name suggests it
allowed us to view the clips we had
logged and transferred before actually
editing them. The box to the right hand
side then displayed the video as it
appeared on the time line. So essentially
the viewer allowed us to preview before
making amendments, while the canvas
allowed us to watch the video back to
ensure we were actually happy with it
This in particular was extremely useful in
that it helped us save time, rather than
simply assuming which clip we wanted to
use, we could preview it before hand.
Log and
transfer
process.
Once we were happy with the clips, this was then when we could
drag them into the time line. We could then simply work from our
storyboard in terms of the production of our documentary. It was
simply a case of trial and error, some things didn’t work as well as
we first planned so therefore needed moving around but this was
easy enough to do.

8. Other features of final cut included editing and this is evident in our documentary as we adopted a variety of different
editing techniques. The tool bar was the most obvious and important feature of final cut, allowing us to make a variety
of amendments to our documentary in order to make it flow more smoothly.
In the editing process we used some tools more than others. One tool which played an important role is the
razor tool. This allowed us to crop certain parts of footage so that we could gain the most important and
valuable parts which stated the most interesting points. For example, the interview with Neil Thompson was
extremely long, we didn’t need the entire thing so we cropped certain points which we considered to be the
most relevant.
This tool also came in useful within our opening montage. With wanting to keep up with the conventions by
being upbeat short, snappy and introducing the content of the documentary, it was important to simply include
important snippets of interviews and this was done using this razor tool.
The pen tool was also a useful feature of the tool bar as it allowed us to edit our sound levels. We did this
a lot throughout our documentary, fading in and out interviews created a more professional approach to
the documentary, rather than the sound levels being jumpy and all over the place it simply made the
documentary run more smoothly.
As already mentioned, this area allowed us to establish whether sound levels
during interviews and vox pops were distorted, so that we could then go back and
normalise them
Sound levels could be controlled in final cut through
the use of these buttons. We could simply turn off the
sound to focus on other aspects, or dip the sound levels.
As well as this in order to focus on just the sound, you
can link and unlink the section which means the clip and
sound are no longer linked. This meant we could move
the clip around where necessary. With doing this we
made a few mistakes where the sound was then out of
sync with the clip. However, once we were all happy with
the way the sound appeared in terms of being cropped
we had to ensure all the sound was normalised. Certain
clips may have been more obvious through the sound
level section in tool bar. In order to normalise sound
levels we simply had to select modify audio then
normalise sound, as shown to the right.

9. Final cut allowed us to make various editing
amendments in order to produce a documentary which
followed conventions of real life products. Some of the
editing techniques we used have already been
mentioned and discussed within previous questions.
This includes the effects we used within final cut. For
example transitions.
We found there was a variety of transitions to choose
from within final cut, we spent a good deal of time
flicking through them in order to try and decide which
would look the best. We decided the non additive
dissolved gave a dramatic effect whilst at the same
time didn’t come across as looking amateur so we
therefore used this transition the most within our
documentary. We also used cut aways on the time line
which created a dramatic effect.