The document discusses the use of various media technologies in the production stages. Premier Pro was used for video editing due to the creator's familiarity and to avoid issues with other software like iMovie. Effects like teleporting and glitches were created using layered shots, crossfades, overlays, and audio editing in Premier Pro. A flashing red dot was added to a phone camera overlay in Photoshop and animated to indicate recording. Photoshop was also used to remove backgrounds, add new backgrounds, and add lighting effects to draw attention to characters for ancillary tasks.

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

2. • While making the different products for my production I used a
number of different creative software in order to create the
desired effects on still imagery and video. The software which I
used for all of my video editing was Adobe Premier Pro, I decided
to use this software as I was far more comfortable working in this
software, which I owned myself, rather than iMovie which we
used in school as last year I encountered a lot of issues in iMovie
such as export issues and compatibility issues with files from
other software such as Photoshop. Therefore, I used Premier,
however this did mean that I wouldn’t be able to do any of my
editing in school and would have to do it all in my own time on
my personal PC. I found that using Premier was overall a better
choice for me as it gave me more creative freedom to be able to
create the different kinds of effects I wanted to. It also has a large
number of stock transitions which can be manipulated freely and
audio and colour management options which made my work
more streamlined as I was able to do the majority of my work in
one program rather than using iMovie for video and then
something like Garage Band or Audacity for the audio editing.

3. • One of the effects that I created was the effect where the
protagonist ‘teleports’ from on scene to another. In order to
create the effect of them fading out from the shot I had to first
film two separate shots of the same scene, one where the
character was there, and another where they weren’t. I used a
tripod in order to make sure that the shots were taken from the
exact same angle to avoid any crossover or tearing when
editing the shots. I then imported them into Premier and put
the two shots next to each other on the timeline and ran an
additive crossfade between the two scenes which gave the
effect of the character fading out of the shot. Another effect
which I made use of is the distortion/glitch effects that are
prominent in my production. I created these by taking an
image created in Photoshop and making it a GIF file so it could
be imported as frames into Premier and not be assigned a
background. I then imported them into Premier and layered
them over the scenes where I wanted to use them. I selected
the effect and set the opacity option to blend with the other
scenes to give the effect that it was all one scene and not
another layered on top. These effects alone didn’t quite give
the effect I wanted so to solve this I got a white noise audio
clip and cut it up into small static sounds which I played during
the effects while the music was being dimmed. I also used
Premier’s distortion audio effect to further ‘damage’ the audio
file to get the sense of distortion that I wanted from the effect.

4. • Also in the production there is a scene where one
character looks through a phone camera at the other
character. In the first draft of this scene it wasn’t clear
that they were looking through the phones camera.
Therefore I decided I would add an overlay that made
it look like an old video camera recording. To make
this I went into Photoshop and added grey 90° corner
with the words ‘REC’ and a small red dot and overlaid
this onto the scene. Doing this was an improvement,
however having a moving scene with a still image on
looked out of place, therefore I wanted to add a
moving component to the overlay. I decided I would
animate the red dot flashing, to do this I went back to
the Photoshop file and created a few frames to
animate in I then duplicated the same scene in all of
the frames, then in every second frame I removed the
red dot so that when played as a GIF file the red dot
will flash to indicate it’s recording. Adding this back
into my production gave the desired effect I wanted
while still looking fluid thanks to the flashing button.

5. • For my ancillary tasks I used Photoshop CS6 for my production. For ancillary one
and two I started with a photo which I took at the location I filmed. I then used
Photoshop to remove the backgrounds of the images, I then added different
backgrounds to the images which helped to make them far more appealing to
look at and also allow them to better fit into the genre. I also noticed that there
was a lot of negative space around the main characters which meant that the
viewer’s eye wasn’t instantly drawn to them. This gave me the idea to use some
lighting effects to create an atmospheric light around the characters which will
draw the eye of the viewer to them to clearly show who the main character is. I
chose Photoshop to do this in over other photo editing software such as Gimp as
Photoshop was a far more fluid software to use from my own experience and had
a far wider range of tools to create the effects I wanted to achieve.