New media technologies were used extensively throughout the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of the project. A computer allowed for efficient online research of film trailers, magazines, and other inspirations. Blogger was used to document research and planning. iMovie was used to edit filmed trailer footage and add music and sounds. Photoshop facilitated editing of digital photos for the film poster and magazine cover. Feedback was gathered through screenings, YouTube, and interviews recorded on video camera. The computer and new media technologies helped present the evaluation through PowerPoints, slideshows, and voiceovers with images and sounds in iMovie.

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

2. Research and Planning From when we first started researching for our project we had been using new media technologies in order to help us. We had to look at different teaser trailers in order to make us used to and familiar with what they are and to look for inspiration for our trailer. To look at these we used the computer to look at sites such as Youtube, imdb, google images and trailer addict and when we had to look for influences for our magazine and posters sites like empire magazine and imdb came in usefull for in inspiration. The computer – being a convergent device – allowed us to research these things quickly and efficiently and also helped us gather our information easily as apposed to spendinh money and going out there look for things in shop sand cinemas, We have also used Blogger to record our research and planning and it has helped by taking direct links from the internet.

3. Also having blogger on our computer allows us to upload our research almost immediately as we did not have to transfer it from machine to machine or write anything up, which also helped with the speed of our project. Presenting our work on a blog gives us a new freedom in what we can do to present our posts. We have experimented with Preze and used slideshare to upload powerpoints onto our blogs, we have also used Wordles to present our feedback in a simple clear way so it is easy to pick out key points. We were also able to make hand written notes or feedback from other class members and scan them into our blog to present as a post, which was helpfull when drawing out our storyboards and filming schedules as we had them all olriginally hand written. We could upload our video footage from the film camera and photos from the digital camera directly onto the computer which was usefull and efficient during the process of editing and making our trailer, poster and magazine cover.

4. Construction Trailer To film our trailer we used a digital film camera and a tripod which we then uploaded the footage from onto the mac computer we were using to construct our film. After importing it into iMovie HD we were able to edit and cut our film appropriately. We were able to do this easily and quickly. The convergence computer came in very useful once again when searching for uncopyrighted music and sound to use in our trailer. We could easily add in and take away sounds in order to experiment. Most of the sounds we used came from the iMovie HD sound effects with one song coming from www.freesound.org. We used the newer version of iMovie for our titles for our trailers because they had a wider range of choices and had the perfect starry background needed for our scifi film. We had alot of choice of colour, font and effects, yet were more experienced using the old iMovie so decided to use that in editing our film.

5. Film Poster and Magazine cover For both the poster and magazine cover we used a digital camera to take the pictures then uploaded them into photoshop to edit and change them. In photoshop we used different tools for different jobs. An example on this is we used the selection tool to select different parts of the image, this came in useful when making the magazine cover and cutting around the picture of our main character in order to get no background in the way. We also used the different layers in photoshop to bring different pictures to the front and create backgrounds, this helped when making the poster as we made the starry sky and had to put in behind the school. We were also able to improve the quality of images by changing the brightness or light levels of them. This made the images look more proffesional for the magazine cover which is what our aim of the design was. We could also apply effects to text and change the shadows and glows to create a SciFi look which helps set the genre when people automatically look at the poster or magazine.

6. Evaluation When putting together our evaluation new media technologies helped a great deal. When finding feedback for our project, we had a class screening which was easy and efficient as we could simply play the film from the computer and all the films were put onto one dvd so they could be easily played, once people had written down their criticism we could simplky scan it onto our blogs to present as a post. We were also able to upload our film onto youtube to gain feedback from an ouitside audience. We also used a video camera to film our friend charlotte giving us feedback after she had watched our trailer through our computer which could then be uploaded straight into iMovie to be edited then onto our blog as part of our evaluation. All these approaches to our feedback gave us a much wider response and allowed us to present our evaluation and research in interesting ways such as a wordle. If we hadn’t had the priveledge of modern media technologies this would have reduced the quality of our feedback and blog and would make is less interesting. In other parts of our evaluation we also used the computer, to create powerpoints and slideshare to put them on our blog. We were also able to go back to our original planning stage and look at the different influences we originally had on youtube and google images to present evidence of our influences and to reming us which bits particularly stood out. We also used a built in microphone to create a voice over of our trailer and anchiliary texts and we found this to be much more enjoyable and interesting than to just write our everything, we added images and sound to this video in iMovie as we did to our trailer which helped is present our evaluation in a clear, simple but interesting way. New media technologies have definatly played an important role in our evaluation and have incresed the quality and speed of our work.