The student used several new media technologies in their construction and research of a film project. They used the blogging platform Blogger to document their research and planning process. They uploaded video clips and drafts of their trailer to YouTube to gather feedback and embed in blog posts. Facebook was used to gather audience feedback through polls and comments. Other tools mentioned include Apple software like iMovie and Final Cut Pro for video editing, as well as Adobe Photoshop for image editing. The student found Blogger, YouTube and Facebook especially useful for sharing their work and collaborating with others online throughout the project.

1. Q4. How did you use new media
technologies in the construction
and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Evaluation

2. Web 2.0
• The term Web 2.0 is associated with web
applications that facilitate participatory
information sharing, interoperability, user-centered
design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A
Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and
collaborate with each other in a social media
dialogue as creators of user-generated content in a
virtual community, in contrast to websites where
users (consumers) are limited to the passive
viewing of content that was created for them.
Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking
sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted
services, web applications.

3. Blogger
• We were required to use a blogging website called Blogger for the research and planning
side of the coursework and also for uploading hyperlinks to videos of the various scenes
of the film and also images showing all of the various stages of the production of the
ancillary texts. Before this I had never had any experience with any blogging websites of
any kind and so this entire process has been a learning experience for me. The first draft
task of creating trailer was also very useful in regards to this side of the coursework as it
not only helped us to prepare for creating the actual final trailer and ancillary texts, but
also gave us some much needed time to grow accustomed to using the blog on a regular
basis to record and document the progression of our research and planning. Overall I
think that my experience in using this website has increased more than with any of the
other programs or equipment used during this project, even if only because of the fact
that I had no previous experience at all. I have learnt to keep my work up-to-date with
regular updates to the blog and also to make sure that I do all of my work in the correct
order so that everything flows together better and is uploaded to the blog in the correct
linear fashion. Using this blog as opposed to a more traditional method such as a simple
portfolio or coursework folder has also provided a great advantage because of the fact
that it is accessible from any computer I may be working on and which has an internet
connection, which prevents the risk of any forgotten or lost work.
• Finally it also means that I was able to include videos or other such influences which I
would not have been able to use at all otherwise, and seeing as the main task this year
has been to create a trailer - this has been the most important part of the blogging
process. Blogger also allows each of its users to customise their blogs and this has been
another thing which my partner and I have used extensively and we have adjusted the
layout of our blogs to conform to the genre of our trailer.

4. YouTube
• YouTube is a well known video sharing website which is used all over the world by
millions of people every day. It allows you to create a free account and then upload
videos up to 10 minutes long and so was the perfect choice for us to upload our trailer. It
then allowed us to embed these video clips into blogposts on Blogger by using HTML
coding. We also used the site to upload a first draft, so that we would be able to embed
this in individual post on the Blogger blog and then write about it and thus show how the
trailer was progressing. We decided to use YouTube over any other video sharing website
as this is by far the most famous and has the highest amount of online user traffic
meaning that the possibility for our video to be seen by a wider audience was much
higher. For this project we decided to create a new account which we would use to
upload all of the video clips to, instead of using already existing accounts, despite the
fact the both my partner and I had one, as this new account would make it easier for us
to organise the videos, and could be specifically customised to advertise our media work.
We were also able to use this website in numerous different ways to collect audience
feedback as other users are able to vote the videos either positively or negatively and
also leave comments. As this was all online we were also able to post a hyperlink of the
video to the social networking website Facebook and receive audience feedback in that
way. One issue which we did find with using YouTube however was the fact that the
videos did take a long time to upload, around one hour and this combined with the time
taken to export the videos from the editing program we were using brought the total
time up to around three hours, meaning that we had to devote a lot of our own time to
this as we did not have this much time during lessons at school.

5. Facebook
• Another website which I have used extensively over the course of
this project is the widely famous social networking site Facebook.
I think that out of the key websites which I have used during this
project - this is actually the only one with which I have any
previous experience, and this was of course very useful considering
the way in which I used the site in relation to my project. I used
this website mainly as an easy way to receive audience feedback
in a relatively short space of time and without having to actually
go out and ask lot and lots of people in turn. Doing this also made
the process of gathering my results to be able to analyse them a
lot easier, as with a questionnaire I found that a lot of time was
spent collating the results and manually typing them up to be able
to use them on the blog or into tables to create graphs. However
by using an online social networking website such as Facebook I
was able to simply copy and paste the information into a Microsoft
Word or Excel document in a matter of minutes.

6. Other websites
• Prezi - Another website which I used during the process of
creating the evaluation was a website called Prezi. Prezi is a
cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new
world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas
makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between
them. The answer for the second question of my evaluation
was done with the use of this service.
• SlideShare – This is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service.
Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following
file formats: PowerPoint, PDF or OpenOffice presentations.
This presentation was uploaded with the use of SlideShare.
• Gmail – Through Gmail I used to communicate with my
teacher and with other members of my group in order to get
information about the whole project.
• Google – To do my research etc.

7. Apple iMovie
• The first program which we decided to use to edit together the clips
which we had filmed into scenes which could be comprised into a finished
trailer was a program created by Apple Inc. called iMovie. As this is an
Apple program it was available to us only at school when we had access to
the Apple Macs there. This software contains all of the necessary basic
tools which we needed to cut down and adjust the clips to place them in
the right order, as well as other features such as adding titles and
transition and fading in and out or cutting out sound completely which
allowed us to make the film seem more professional, it was also linked to
Apples sound editing program GarageBand as well as a readily installed
library of basic background music tracks and sound effects. We were
originally planning on making our whole film on iMovie as this was at the
time the only program available to us (Final Cut was not working),
however due to the fact that we became constantly frustrated with how
well the program was running we decided to discontinue use of it after we
had produced the first draft of a trailer. We also encountered other much
more pressing issues such as the fact that were only actually able to
access the program for a few short hours each week as it was installed
only on very few Apple Macs which were located at school and we only
had access to these during lesson time.

8. Final Cut Pro
• After iMovie we decided that we were going to try and find a
different, and a better program for editing our video clips and so we
decided to try out Final Cut Pro. We instantly found that the
program was of a much higher quality than iMovie. There were
initially a few problems in getting Final Cut Pro open, but after few
lessons our school technicians have finally fixed the problem.

9. Adobe Photoshop
• The main piece of editing software which we used in the construction of our ancillary
production pieces was an image editing program called Adobe Photoshop. This program
allows you to do an extremely wide range of things to multiple image sat once and can
even be configured to perform certain processes on a large amount of images
automatically without the user actually having to do anything. I was already at quite a
significant advantage when we started the project in this respect as I had already been
teaching myself in the use of this program for the past couple of years and I also had a
lot of experience from my AS Level Media the previous year. I decided to use this
particular program as opposed to others which were available at the time for a number
of reasons, first of all and the main reason why I chose Photoshop was because I had a
large amount of previous experience with this particular program and have not actually
ever used any others. It was also extremely useful that the both school computers (Macs
and normal computers) which were available for us to use at school during lesson time,
and also my own computer, had the same software installed and so I was able to quickly
and easily transfer files between the two via my USB stick. The only difference was the
fact that at home I had newer version – CS5 (in school – CS3), which I have downloaded
through Adobe website for free (30 days trial version). Since the beginning of the project
my skills in using Photoshop have again improved even further and I enjoyed being able
to use the program for a much wider variety of processes, as I did in fact use the one
program for the production of my entire film poster and magazine front cover, as
opposed to using it for only the film poster and then using another program, Adobe
InDesign, for the magazine front cover as few other people have done.

10. Adobe After Effects CS4
• Adobe After Effects CS4 - is a digital motion graphics and
compositing software published by Adobe Systems, used in
the post-production process of filmmaking and television
production. It is primarily used for creating motion graphics
and visual effects. I have downloaded a free trial version at
home of this software, because I needed to create a good
company logo effect at the start of the trailer. With the use
of few tutorials available on the Internet, I was able to
create really good company logo intro for my trailer. I also
used this software to create any text that I was going to put
on my trailer. For example, I created a text between the
scenes telling the storyline with the use of this software. I
also created a title, credits, date shot in this software. I
think it is really hard to use and because I never have
actually used it before – it took me about 6 hours just to get
used to what the basics are.

11. Apple Garage Band
• Another additional program which we decided to use during the production of our
short film was a piece of Audio software available to us on the Apple Macs which
allowed us to create our own music tracks by combining various different premade
audio loops of varying lengths. We decided to use this to create a series of basic
soundtracks to some of the scenes in our trailer. In the end we only used the
program to create two different audio tracks, one which was used at the end of
the film and another calmer background music which was used throughout the
whole trailer, each version differing slightly in background sounds and length. The
program also allowed us to add in sound effects such as the ones which we had
used in iMovie and the finished tracks were also able to be exported directly into
Final Cut Pro. When we did switch over to using Final Cut Pro instead, this did
make the process slightly more complicated as it meant we now had to export the
tracks to .mp3 or .wav format, but this could all still be done very quickly and was
merely a minor inconvenience. I myself did have some minimal experience in using
this particular program before we decided to use it for this project, although I had
only used it in the past for messing around in ICT and creating experimental music
tracks by trying out each of the different instruments. Whilst this did not really
give me much experience in creating technically professional sounding audio tracks
even what little prior experience I had proved to be very useful as I did indeed
already know my way around all of the unique features of the program and its
layout.

12. Other software
• Windows Movie Maker – In order to create our first
draft, we had to use this software. It was really
easy to use, but it only had basic features.
• Internet Explorer – In order to do some research
and access our blogs, we had to use this internet
browser.
• Microsoft PowerPoint – This presentation was
created in Microsoft PowerPoint software, which
enabled me to use different layouts, transitions
and animations.
• iDVD – With software you can create and burn
professional-looking DVDs to share your movies and
photo slideshows. We used this software to burn
our final project on a DVD.

13. Camera
• For this project we were given the option of using video cameras available to us through the
school by means of loaning them out whenever we needed to film scenes. Because we didn’t
have any good video cameras at home, we decided to use school equipment. At the start of the
course, we only had an option to loan normal cameras, which had in comparison to HD cameras
really bad quality. However, it was still enough to film our first draft. Then, for our final draft
we had a chance to use small HD Cameras and a huge HD Camera which all the equipment
attached to it. Because of the lack of organisation from our actors, we only had one lesson to
use a huge HD Camera in order to get our footage sorted. Therefore, we didn’t have enough
time to film all of the scenes required. This is why, we decided to film the scenes, where a
good quality was really important, e.g. the last scene of our trailer. As well as the extremely
high quality the camera had a extremely good microphone which was more than good enough
for our film as only a few of the scenes required us to record sound. As well as this it also had
10x optical zoom which allowed us to film the same scenes from a number of distances,
whichever was practical for the location, as well as shooting a few shots which actually
included the zoom within them, although we did try to limit the use of this. As I mentioned
before, we only had one lesson to use really professional HD Camera due to lack of organisation
from our actors and for other main scenes – we have used small HD Cameras. They were really
good as well and the only problem was the fact that it didn’t record sound as well as the huge
HD Camera. This is why we focused on the scenes where the sound was not as important.
Unfortunately, for our last lesson, where we suppose to get the rest of our footage done – the
small HD Cameras were already taken. We didn’t want to waste anymore and that’s why
decided to use small bad quality cameras. The only other equipment which we did make sure
that we always used was a basic tripod to hold the camera in place and to stop any movement
which would occur if the camera was hand held during filming. We also used digital cameras in
order to get few pictures that we needed for our research and planning stage.

14. END
• Thank you for your time!