During their media project, the students used various media technologies for research, planning, construction, and evaluation. For research, they used websites like Google and YouTube to research the social realism genre and analyze film trailers. They created questionnaires using Google Docs and Excel to conduct primary research. For construction, they used a digital camera, Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro to film footage and edit their trailer. They also created ancillary texts in Photoshop. For evaluation, they uploaded questions to SlideShare and Prezi to gather feedback and reflect on their progress.

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

2. As we know, technology is becoming better and better and enables
us to do things we were never able to do before. This had allowed us
to complete our construction, research and planning and evaluation
stages of our media project much more efficiently. Some of the
websites and software’s that we used to carry out research and our
productions were, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint Presentation, Final
Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop CS4, YouTube, Google, Facebook,
BlackBerry Messenger, Excel and Prezzi. The thing we found the
most beneficial and convenient was the digital camera that we had
used to film footage for our trailer. The reason for this is because it
had allowed us to film a lot more footage than what we could have
done with the old camera’s and we didn’t need to worry about
deleting anything or limiting the amount of footage we needed to film.
Also, this camera had allowed us to take location shots whilst we
were filming which was a lot less time consuming.

3. We used the internet quite a lot during our project and especially for
our researching stage. Before we started our project, we wanted to
find out more about what people already knew about the genre that
we had chosen to do which was Social Realism. We used Google
Docs to create our questionnaire and then we decided to distribute
this questionnaire to our class mates and post a link onto our
Facebook pages so our friends could answer the questionnaire
online. After we had received our completed questionnaire’s we then
decided to use Excel in order to create a pie chart, which gave us the
average of what people answered for each question. On the other
hand, our secondary research was more from search engines such
as Google. We created a timeline of Social Realism films in order to
gain an understanding of how this genre has developed over time.
This had helped us considerably more than our primary research, as
this was much broader. We also used YouTube to search film trailers
that we then analysed, which gave us an idea of the film shots and
sequences we could use in our trailer.

4. The construction stage for our project used a lot more technology that
the research and planning stages. We had used a digital camera to film
our footage as well as taking location shots. We also used a Nikon
camera to take photos of the storyboard picture that we created and
uploaded it onto an Apple Mac computer to put the individual pictures
from the storyboard into a short film using Motion and Final Cut Pro. For
our ancillary texts we used Photoshop and Paint to edit the main
characters that we wanted to use as the primary images on our
magazine cover and film poster. Photoshop is one of the main
programmes that has improved over time and was the most useful media
technology that we had used throughout our media project and the
reason for this is because when we made a mistake or we needed to
change something, we were able to lock the other layers so that they
wouldn’t move out of place whilst we were making these changes. We
tried to use Motion to create our production logo but we didn’t really feel
that we needed to focus that much on this part as we still need to edit our
trailer. So we decided to use Photoshop instead to create a sign post
which said ‘Chalk Farm Entertainment’ on it, which signifies the genre of
our film as it represents street life.Photoshop
Production Logo

5. Last year Media Studies, we used Live Type and we used
the sound effects on Motion to add texts and add sound to
our film opening that we created. This made it more
appealing and enticing to the audience and creates an
adrenalin rush as we used slow music to build tension. We
also used sound effects for the fighting part of our film
opening to make it seem more life-like and real. We knew
we done this well as we then receive a lot of good
feedback after we uploaded our final film opening onto
YouTube. However, this year we decided to use sound
that was self-made.

6. For our evaluation stage, we decided to use SlideShare
(www.slideshare.net) to upload one of our evaluation questions,
and the reason we decided to do this is because SlideShare allows
you to upload any work that you have done and puts it together as a
presentation. We also used Prezzi (www.prezi.com) for one of our
evaluation questions because it makes it look more interesting and
attractive. One of the things we did that we really thought would
help us to develop our evaluation is include pictures. This allowed
us to show the progress that we have made as a pair throughout
the start of our media project. It had also helped is to talk about
what we thought was done correctly and what we and the audience
thought we could have done better in order to improve our
production.
Snap shot of prezi