The document discusses the various media technologies used during the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of a film project. Sony Vegas and Photoshop were used for editing film and creating film posters/reviews. GoPro and Lumix cameras were used for filming, though low light performance was an issue. Blogger and YouTube facilitated online research, planning, and sharing of videos. Dafont and Freesound provided fonts and sound effects. Wordle helped with brainstorming and evaluating ideas.

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

2.  Sony Vegas is the name of the program that I used to edit all
of my film. I chose to use it as I have used it a lot in the past
and so was already confident using it. It allowed me to edit
the film quickly and easily without any limitations so I am
pleased that I used it.

3.  Photoshop was the program that I decided to use to create
both my film review and film poster. It seemed like the
obvious choice to me because it is perfect for making these
type of products and I have used it a lot in the past so I knew
I wouldn’t struggle with not knowing how to use it. I am
pleased I did use it as it was very easy to create the ideas that
I had in mind. It has very in depth photo editing options as
well as good text features, which made it a lot easier as I
could do everything in the same program.

4.  The cameras that I used for all of my filming were the GoPro
HD Hero 2 and the Panasonic Lumix FZ45. I used the Lumix
for all of the normal shots and the GoPro for the POV shots as
it comes with a head strap that makes it very easy to attach it
to the actors head. I found that neither of the cameras
performed particularly well in the low-light that I filmed in. In
particular the GoPro struggled, as it has a much smaller light
sensor being a small, mountable camera. This lead to some of
the shots being very grainy, which made the film look
unprofessional.

5. Unfortunately I didn’t have access to any lighting equipment to
shoot my film with, so I had to try and find another source of
lighting. I decided to use the built in torch from my phone as it is
surprisingly bright and lights up a wide area. This helped me a lot
during the filming as without it the subject would have been
harder to see. For some of the shots the light was too bright and
ruined the shot, so I found a good way to dim the torch which
was to wrap a tissue around it. Although quite unorthodox I found
this technique to be very effective and I am glad I used it.

6.  I used blogger to create my blog which meant that I could
conduct all of my research and planning online. This was very
helpful as it meant I could access my work from any computer
without having to keep it on a USB stick. It also has a lot of
useful features such as being to create a poll which I used to
ask my audience what they thought my film should be called.
I found blogger easy to use as it is very simple to upload a
post, and even go back and edit them after if you want to
change something.

7.  I chose YouTube as the website to use to upload all of the
videos that I posted on my blog. The reason that I chose
YouTube over another video sharing website like Vimeo is
because it allows me to upload in HD which means that I can
retain the same quality of my film even after uploading it, and
it has easy embed features which made it easy to put them
into my blog posts.

8.  These two websites helped me a lot to create my ancillaries
as well as the main product. Dafont was crucial to me whilst
making the poster and film review as it allowed me to find a
wide range of professional fonts that you cant find on the
computer by default. An example of a font I used from the
website is ‘The Game’ on the poster which I found by
searching for horror. If I had just used the default fonts both
products would have looked a lot less professional and
generally less exciting.

9.  Freesound is a website where users can upload a sound and
then other users can download it for free. There is a very wide
range of sounds available on the website, ranging from
recordings of storms to gunshots, however I mostly just used
it for the monster sound effects as well as some other scary
effects to help create the horror atmosphere.

10.  Wordle helped me a lot during the research process. It
allowed me to creatively brainstorm all of my ideas to make it
more interesting to look at than just a normal list of words.
Wordle has also helped greatly during the evaluation
process, as I have been making one at the start of the
question to get me thinking about all of the different areas of
the question and it helps me to roughly plan what I am going
to talk about in my answer. I also think that it looks quite
good to whoever is reading my blog as they can see roughly
what the answer is going to be about without actually reading
the whole post.

11.  In conclusion, I used a very wide range of media technologies
during the construction, research, planning and evaluation
stages of creating my products. Each form of technology
helped me in different ways and in different parts of the
process.