The document discusses the various new media technologies used at different stages of a film project, including research, planning, production, and evaluation. Google, YouTube, and film websites were used for inspiration and research. Celtx was used to write the script, and Word was used to create shot lists and storyboards. Photoshop was used for posters, and editing software like Premier Pro and Final Cut Pro were used to edit footage. PowerPoint and Word were used to evaluate the project. Overall a wide range of software and online tools were relied on at each stage of making the short film.

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

2. Research

3. Google
During the research process, I relied
on google to help inspire me by
looking at other short films that
people had already created to help
generate some ideas. I also
researched age ratings, what age
ratings were and how they worked
and possible distributors for my film.
This aided me in coming up with
concept of my short film idea as well
as making sure my short film was
being made for the right audience.
Google became a recurring search
engine throughout my entire
researching process.

4. BBFC
When it came to finally deciding on a age rating for
my film I used the BBFC website to help make my
decision as it is a reliable source of information. The
website goes into a lot of detail about why each rating
exists and how it aims to protect more vulnerable
members of the audience. Our group decided to make
our film a 15 due to the strong language and violence
depicted throughout. However, I feel our film would
have benefitted from having a lower age rating, as the
violence is minimalistic when compared to other 15
rated films I have viewed. This would have helped
broaden our audience for our film as a bigger age
range would be able to view it.

5. Youtube & Short
film of the week
When researching ideas for the short film, I wanted to
watch projects already created to help generate ideas and
inspire myself. I decided to go to Youtube to begin with due
to endless amount of content posted on the site daily which
meant there was more of a chance that I would find
something I liked. Upon watching a video, a link to ‘Short of
the week.com’ was posted in the description which lead me
to a website with the sole purpose of showcasing all
different types of short films. This proved to be very useful
not only for film ideas but also for shooting tricks and
techniques to help improve our film when we came to shoot
it. Youtube ending up proving to be a very useful tool during
our project, not only for story ideas but also for credit and
title sequences. We also used Youtube to post our groups
content such as music we might use in our film and video
diaries of the shooting process. Short of the week ending up
being a useful website for seeing fully finished and
professional quality short films and taking tips from the
different ways and styles they shot in and later using it in
our work.

6. Questionnaires
To gain more information about how our film well our film
would do with an audience as well to gain insight into
whether we can make improvements to our film we handed
out a questionnaire to 5 people. We used Microsoft
PowerPoint to collect the data and then created a pie chart
to easily compare the results we collected. Entering the data
for the pie charts sometimes proved to be a bit confusing,
resulting in entering incorrect data, due to the layout of the
data entering system, however after a bit of practice it was
easy to come to terms with. If this questionnaire was
repeated it could be improved by handing it out to more
people to produce more useful results, as well as give the
person answering the questionnaire the option to give their
opinion rather than just multiple choice answer boxes. This
ultimately limited our results slightly for the group as the
audience could only answer using certain options and not
give their full honest opinion.

7. Planning

8. We used Celtx to write our shooting script for our
film. I also used Celtx in my project last year and so
was quite familiar with the program, making it easy
to use and work with. We did have one issue with
Celtx where we found our files wouldn’t save,
causing us to have to re-write past sections which
became annoying and wasted time, however this
happened at the start of the script writing process
which meant that we didn’t lose to much of the work
which was already done. The nest time I use Celtx I
will make sure to back up all the work regularly on a
memory to prevent loss of hard work and to save
time. Over all apart from the one saving issue, Celtx
was a very useful tool ,with its clear and organised
layout and easy to use functions, it made it creating a
shooting script quick and efficient.
Celtx

9. Word
From the script, we then proceeded to
create the ‘shot list’ using word, and then a
‘tricky shots list’. We created a table in word
with a section for each shot in order, what
happened in the shot, the characters in the
shot, the type of shot and the location of the
shot. The table tool in word proved to be
very useful and easy to use, with the ability
to manipulate the shape of the table as well
as delete/add columns/rows wherever
needed. This came in handy for us as we
found that we had to take out shots from
the middle of the table that we no longer
needed, which was easy as we could just
select the column to delete, rather than
having the rearrange the whole table.

10. Storyboard
We decided to create a storyboard using the
script and shot list as a guide to help
visualise the shots we were aiming to do,
giving us an overall idea of what our film
will look like. We decided to do our story
board on paper, however this proved to be a
painfully long process which wasted quite a
lot of time due to our film having so many
shots. We needed to create a panel for each
shot listed in our shot list (123) which
proved to take a very long time. If we were
to do this again I would opt for an online
tool to create the story board as this would
be a lot more efficient and time saving, as
well as create a more realistic visual idea of
our final film that cant be created by hand.

11. Location Shots
We decided to take shots of the locations we
would be filming in to help give us a more
in depth idea of what our shots will look
like, and give us a sense of the environment
that our characters ‘live’ in. We took photos
of Ella’s house, different parts of the sixth
form building such as a computer
classroom as well as the park where we
planned to film our final scene. The location
photos also helped us create our shot list as
we could see what advantages and
disadvantages of the environment we had to
work with when shooting. Overall this
proved to be a very useful process.

12. Blogger
Throughout all of our project we used Blogger to
post and record our findings, research and
progress with our film in one place. This became
a very useful tool for sharing content with the
rest of our group such as findings as well as
planning our film together with help from its
very useful search tool which helps navigate
through all your work. The program proved to be
useful for showing the progress of our film over
time, from our initial ideas to the finished
product. The website is very easy to use with
many customisable features to personalise your
blog, however one downside of it is that the
document typing tool is limited. For most of my
work I used Word and PowerPoint as I found
these more efficient when writing up my
findings which I later screenshotted and then
posted on Blogger.

13. Production

14. Camera
We used the Canon Legria HFG25 to shoot our film.
This camera was different to the one I used in last
years project, however its easy to use layout meant
I needed very little time to get used to using it. This
camera is much higher quality than the camera
from my AS project as well as being much easier to
use with its touch screen navigation and large
storage capacity. The camera also has a focus assist
tool which came in very useful four our group as
we used pull focus a lot in our film, and found it
tricky to focus manually without lowering the
overall quality of the shot. The overall quality of the
video is a big improvement from the AS project
camera as well, helping lift the quality of our final
product. Over all, the layout and quality of this
camera meant we could take the shots we
envisioned with little trouble.

15. Premier Pro
The editing software we used for our film was
Premier Pro. We used this to edit the footage we
shot and create our final film. This Adobe app is
used for feature films and so has endless
possibilities when it comes to creative freedom.
However, I found the program difficult and
confusing to use, even after having quite a lot of
experience with the program form the year before.
The program comes with many great features for
editing which we used throughout our film like
animated masking and blurring effects, however
the layout of the app becomes its downfall and the
potential to create something great becomes very
difficult as I hardly knew how to use its features.
This overall was an extremely useful programme,
however it could have been even more useful had it
been easier to use.

16. Final Cut Pro X
We used Final Cut Pro X in our
film to a green screen for our title
sequence which require a lot of
moving images and flashes in the
background behind the text. Like
Premier Pro, Final Cut Pro X is
very difficult to use if you are a
beginner as these are very similar
programs and used for
professional feature films.

17. Photoshop
We used Photoshop to create the posters for our
films. Each member of our group created a draft
and then the best one was used for the final poster.
Photoshop offers so many useful tools, especially
for creative tasks such as this one, which the ability
to manipulate objects, colour correct and change as
well as paint the opportunities were endless. The
downfalls of photoshop is the lack of text options,
as well as it being quite a confusing programme to
use if you’re a beginner. I have a lot of experience
with photoshop and so know how to use it really
well which meant I ended up editing and finalising
the final poster, where as some members of my
group struggled. This programme was very useful
for this part of our project due to the creative
freedom that it offered.

18. H1 Zoom Recorder
We used this recording device to record the audio
for parts our film that needed to be a voice over
and for our radio trailer. We originally ran into
some issues when first using the product. Even
though it is straight forward and easy to use, every
time we went to put the recording into premier
pro, parts of the recording would be missing,
however on the third try it was successful and
proved to be very crisp and clean audio quality.
This equipment is useful as it only picks up sound
that travels directly into the top of it, meaning that
environment sounds and wind shouldn’t affect the
quality of the audio. Despite the trouble we ran
into, the successful attempt produced high quality
audio that improved our films quality.

19. Evaluation

20. Word
I decided to use Word for most of
my evaluation questions as it is
the most familiar programme to
me after being introduced to it at
a very young age, and Essay form
was suggested to me to present a
clear and concise answer to my
questions.

21. Power point
I decided to use Power point as a way
to evaluate my project as it offers
many different options to present my
work, including audio, images and
videos. As a film project consisting of
mostly visual work can often be
difficult to summarise in just words,
having this other visual and audio aids
can help summarise the work more
clearly and understandable. This
programme is also very easy to use for
me as I have been using it all my life,
making it an efficient and time saving
option.