During the construction, research, planning, and evaluation stages of their project, the document's author used various media technologies. They researched film genres on websites like IMDB to identify conventions. They used InDesign, Photoshop, and Paint Shop Pro to design their film poster and magazine cover, editing images and fonts. Finally, they edited their film using Serif MoviePlus 5 to add effects and dub sounds, tailoring it to their chosen genre.

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

2. During the whole course of our construction, research, planning, and evaluation stages, we used a variety of media technologies. To begin with, we had to research our chosen genre, for this, I looked up other films of this genre, mainly on ‘imdb.com’ which has plenty of information on films, including a trivia section and it also has the trailers available to watch, which helped identify conventions we needed to follow, or perhaps not follow. Also on the website are related films so we could get a wider choice of related films to research.

3. For our film poster, and magazine cover, we used a mixture of ‘InDesign’, ‘Photoshop’, and ‘Paint Shop Pro’. InDesign was the main program that we used to compose the film poster, however we used Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro to edit our images. With these programs, we could edit the contrast, add effects such as shadow and fades, and alter the colours to give a more professional look.

4. For our fonts used on the film poster and magazine cover, we used ‘DaFont.com’ which has a huge choice of fonts available to download. After narrowing down some fonts and lining them up next to each other, we all decided on one. We then used Photoshop to edit this font, we changed the colours and also the alignment of the letters.

5. Finally, to edit our film, we used Serif MoviePlus 5. I had used this program last year so I knew how to use the majority of tools that are available. We were able to create some good effects, for example the elevator clip. Another thing we were able to do, was to dub out any ambient sounds we didn’t need and put in sounds we did need, for example the gunshot sounds, which were downloaded off the internet and are very significant to portray the gangster genre.