Using Canva, Powtoon, Emaze, Prezi, books, magazines, VLE school sources, Survey Monkey, and YouTube helped the group with their planning and evaluation stages in several ways. These technologies helped make their work more organized, creative, fun, and engaging for audiences. They enabled the group to develop skills like focus, organization, communication, and using different sources of information. However, some technologies like Powtoon and Prezi took more time than others.

1. WHAT TECHNOLOGY DID YOU USE DURING THE PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES; HOW DID IT HELP YOU?
QUESTION 4

2. Canva
• In the stages during the planning and evaluation. We used online platforms such as ‘canva’. Canva is a product where it
enables you to release your own creativity by making poster like products. It lets you access features such as ; funky
backgrounds, bright colours, images and different fonts that you can use. Moreover canva lets you make posters which will
portray our research and planning stages in a fun and interesting way. It is creative rather than functional. Canva has helped
our planning and evaluation stages by helping us to be more organised by breaking our information down into sections, it
helped to refine certain details and improve our work overall. Not only was it fun to use but it is aesthetically pleasing to
viewers which will create interest in what we have written. Moreover by communicating our products through canva it has
helped show each members creativity and each members personality. ‘Making the world your own’ which is stated by David
Gauntlett, where he believes that web 2.0 allows us to create our own unique identity, which we are seen by doing this by
using canva by letting us be creative with how we portray our research and evaluation stages.
• From using Canva, it is has helped develop our skills. Firstly it it has increased our focus because of portraying information
in a fun and bright way, instead of portraying our work in a boring dull essay based product. Another point to evaluate is that
if we are using Canva for large pieces of text, is this not just the same as an essay and our group members will be inclined
to read it. Therefore, our ideas will be communicated efficiently between team members. Canva makes us focused as well
because we are making a product that we can edit and work on with our own creativity by making it look interesting.
Furthermore, it has also helped develop our organisation skills, because of the website being easy to use and follow, you
know exactly what your doing throughout making it. Furthermore it has also helped us become more practical with our work,
it has as well helped develop our keyboard skills and internet skills. Consequently it has also helped our group increasing
our communicating skills by addressing the audience our information in a way where we find it easy and efficient to portray
our information.

3. https://www.canva.com

4. Powtoon
• Powtoon is another online technology our group used to portray information on. Powtoon is a practical way of showing our ideas to
viewers, it is an animated video like product which lets you access fun colours and animated images that will overall look more interesting
to the viewer enticing them to watch more. We used Powtoon because it is not boring. It directly communicates with the viewer, by using a
fun way of acknowledging the viewer, it will make the the viewer pay more attention and receive what is being said, which therefore
comprises with the theory of uses and gratifications where the audience is satisfied with what the product is telling them, from the
audience being conceived as active. Moreover by using Powtoon to convey planning and evaluation tasks, it enabled my sense of
communicating to the audience in a more fun and different way during the production stages, which builds an audience. Building an
audience early is important for our independent production because of it not having the money to use expensive ways of creating interest
for our audience and attracting an audience by big advertisements. We used fun ways of portraying information to create an attraction to
read our posts and take in the information and understand what we are constructing within our products.
• The skills that i have developed with using Powtoon would be that I became more aware of how to find and utilise different sources, to
ensure the product isn't all the same on our A2 blog. Therefore made our blog more personal from each member in the group using
different sources in different ways. It also helped developing the ability to use online sources including selecting and editing which is most
appropriate for our stages of planning and evaluation.
• Using Powtoon, had some criticisms when using it. Such as it was very time consuming, because of the detail and effects you had to
attain to, since it being a video styled presentation. You had to make sure that there was enough time to read the information on each
slide, for me I found this most difficult because I found it hard to read in the amount of time on each slide because I would write a dense
amount of text especially in my locations powtoon. However I did this solve this problem by breaking up the text and adding it to added
slides. In addition because of the time taken, it could be seen as ‘style over substance’.

5. https://www.powtoon.com/home/

6. Emaze
• In our production through the stages of evaluation and planning, we used a product called emaze. Emaze is an online
presentation platform. It enabled us to create, manage, and share presentations onto our blog for viewers. Emaze offers a variety
of presentational templates including formats using 3D animations and video backgrounds to make online presentations stand
out. These features helped us to create individuality to our work and our blog which created a fun atmosphere not just on our blog
but to our production. This also fits with our documentary as well, although it is aspirational, it is still a documentary. This product
is easy to use because everything is in sight on the website all the features are easy to find and simple to use. It is also easy to
follow with titles and sub headings which helped when producing emazes' therefore making our planning and evaluation products
‘emazing’.
• Moreover from using Emaze, it enabled our work to have a more enthusiastic outlook of our planning and evaluation stages, by
having new platforms to produce our work. By using emaze it overall helped build our skills in organisation and creativity by using
new features, and helping us try new things such as emaze itself. Furthermore by using emaze it helped us become more familiar
with the internet and what to search up including images, and cool fonts to interest the viewer, and because of how much you can
write on emaze without it not looking heavily written, we could include more depth of knowledge making sure that we are also
addressing the audience with information and terminology throughout. However amaze had some problems. The main problem
was the timing, you had to make sure that the the amount of text on each slide matched the timing. That there was enough time to
read the text, this was a problem for me so I had to break up each text on each slide, so that there was enough time to read what
was written and not being rushed to read the information. For the viewer to receive what is being said and process it.

7. https://app.emaze.com/mypresentations#/home

8. Prezi
• Prezi is a presentation tool that can be used as an alternative to traditional slide making programs such as PowerPoint. Instead of slides, Prezi
makes use of one large canvas that allows you to pan and zoom to various parts of the canvas and emphasise the ideas presented there making
the information more valid to the viewer by remembering it. This is a creative way of sourcing information and making it fun to read and watch the
animation of whats being said. Prezi works like brain-storming, which was useful for our creativity in our planning and evaluation stages.
• Prezi has helped our skills by communicating with our audience, making our audience really understand our production and the techniques to make
a lasting impact. The tools to use prezi was very easy to use to deliver truly stunning presentations. Moreover Prezi has helped develop our skills to
compact information down and not to go overboard with writing a lot that could potentially bore the viewer and therefore meaning the audience wont
take in the information that has been said because of the small boxes and small amount of text, this particularly helped my skills in compacting
information down, because I would tend to write too much and not be direct of what I needed to inform. Therefore by developing our skills of writing
it has helped our skills of being able to get straight to the point instead of baffling on and writing irrelevant information in our writing. Consequently it
has also helped our skills in creativity because by using different platforms and using different ways of addressing information to the viewer it has
helped us to think of different ways of communication and not sticking to something that does not challenge us in trying something new and
benefiting the interest of the viewer. It has also helped our creativity because it has a different approach of presenting our work, this presentational
method has helped organise ideas in different ways, it helped make links that we didn't see before this is because of how organised Prezi is. On the
other hand Prezi has helped develop our imaginative side with how to use the features and be creative, it helped visualise different ways of doing
things.
• However, Prezi does not integrate effectively with the blog that we were using. It is very different to the other techniques that we have used, even
though using different platforms of presenting work may be considered being creative it may look disconnected to the rest of the blog with the other
sources of presentational methods. The combination of Prezi with the other presentational tools did not make a whole. This can suggest the
exposure of the myth that the internet is completely reliable, easy and an integrated mediascape.

9. https://prezi.com

10. Books and magazines
• As an alternative technology we used books and magazines. In the process of our planning and evaluation stages, we looked at books
such as the ‘Shut up and shoot’ which is a documentary guide by Anthony Q. Artis, where he gives information which is extremely
helpful for new documentary film makers like ourselves. We had the chance to read and learn about information that would be very
helpful such as how to use a camera and how to prevent things from happening that would set us back in production stages and to
maximise your resources and do more with less. We chose to use books as a helpful platform in the stages of planning and evaluation
because we believe that we needed all sorts of platforms from the internet to books to help us gather all information and help that we
needed to fulfil our best interests in our production. We also used magazines such as the media magazine sept 2014 ‘love your
viewfinder: framing your story’, the media magazine sept 2010 ‘ Creative Film- Making for the creatively challenged’, the media
magazine feb 2011 ‘Where Everyman Knows Your Name: the 21st century of Culture of Independent Cinemas’ (independence
exhibition). We also used magazines such as Media Magazine Dec 2009 ‘Reality Bites; Documentary in the 21st century, Media
magazine Dec 2009 ‘Score! Football on film.’ Moreover we also used the Media Magazine Feb 2017’ mirror, mirror on the Wall’… We
used magazines as well as a platform because we felt as if it would give different information from media professionals to our planning
and evaluation stages.
• By using books and magazines it has helped our skills by deepening our understanding of our planning and evaluation stages and
knowing more information about our production overall from using different books and magazines. Furthermore books have helped
develop our skills in using different sources, and has been easier in the terms of finding relevant information for example they are
indexed unlike the internet. However from using books it was hard to find the particular thing that we needed to find unlike the internet
where you can search for anything and everything. Another critique about using an alternative technology such as books, is that the
‘Shut up and shoot’ book was outdated and was not dated to our modern day society today so was not all relevant to all of our work,
this is because there is newer and better techniques, equipment and information nowadays then in the book.

12. vle school sources
• Throughout our planning and evaluation stages we used sources from our school website called the VLE. The VLE is a site of
sources which enables you to gather information to help us when working on these stages. We used sources such as ; Marketing
short film, How to make a Short Documentary, Teaching Film and Documentary, Postmodernism and documentary, Theoretical
Research, Radio Glossary, FM Station Profiles, Keys to Effective Radio Advertising and 4 keys to Radio Advertising. These were
all documents that helped us immensely to give proper information that will make sure we know the sophistication of knowledge
of film, and to make sure that we are doing everything right to produce our three media products to a stage that will interest our
audience and will make sure they are being acknowledged correctly of what is being said.
• Using sources such as the VLE it has helped develop skills such as researching into different sources and getting new
information to include in our stages of planning and evaluation. However because the information was all on the VLE we did not
need to search for the documents so can be contradicted with how good we are at finding relevant online content. Furthermore
the documents that we used did have more relevance than other documents for example I found that the document
‘Postmodernism and documentary’ was very useful. However I found that the Radio glossary did not fulfil the needs of being very
useful so I did have to ask for help from my media teacher and group members to answer questions that I had. Consequently
from other students using the same documents on the VLE it did affect how original our ideas were as they developed. However
the VLE documents have also developed our skills within our reading skills because once we have read the text we use the
following techniques of scanning and skimming to help us identify areas that are detailed and important to use in our work.

13. survey monkey
• Throughout our planning and evaluation stages we used a platform called Survey Monkey to portray our questionnaires and to
apply them to our audience by asking them questions about our overall three products. We researched into what they liked and
didn't like from their answers from the Questionnaires. Survey Monkey has made our research into evaluating a lot easier to find
out information without having to take a lot time out of the audiences time and our time. It is easy and simple to follow, answering
yes or no. Survey Monkey has helped our skills by communicating through a different way. Not face to face, but directly addressing
the audience by questions which again aren't hard to follow at all. However, with using Survey Monkey it did have problems. For
example we couldn't embed it straight onto the school blog and send straight to our audience via text message and email, and can
be argued that it wasn't very easy to follow and we did have some problems with having to send them to our audience, which didn't
give the best first impressions to our production. Moreover this was overcome by sending the questionnaires in our evaluation
stages through face messenger which therefore limits our audience to who is on Facebook and ho is active on facebook to
respond. Another problem with Survey monkey was that because it was over the internet and not face to face communication if any
of the audience had any problems or questions about the question we could not help, this would mean that they would have to
answer the question without knowing what was really being asked. However we tried to decrease the chances of this foreseen
issue by only asking simple questions that are not hard to answer at all.
• Using Survey Monkey as helped to develop our skills as overcoming problems and acting under pressure where we relish under
pressure, which will help to improve future tasks such as these by working under pressure and to always think of the audience and
their experience to.

14. https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/welcome/sem/?&opt=brand&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_1006471654_g_51196105178
_c_237034457408_k_survey%20monkey_m_e_w_kwd-
296072060070_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_1006525_ii__vi__&utm_source=a
dwords&utm_medium=ppc&utm_term=survey%20monkey&utm_network=g&utm_campaign=UK_Search_Alph
a_Brand&cmpid=brand&cvosrc=ppc.google.survey%20monkey&keyword=survey%20monkey&matchtype=e&
network=g&mobile=0&searchntwk=1&creative=237034457408&adposition=1t1&campaign=UK_Search_Alpha
_Brand&cvo_campaign=UK_Search_Alpha_Brand&cvo_adgroup=survey+monkey&dkilp=&cvo_creative=2370
34457408&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_djbv8ny1wIVwrztCh15wwMXEAAYASAAEgI6_PD_BwE

15. Youtube
• Youtube has helped our group massively through our planning and evaluation stages. Youtube is a huge platform where you can
access music, entertainment, information, upload of videos etc. All these features have helped us hugely. For example we used
youtube the most frequently for tutorials on how to adjust the lighting on photos and editing on final cut pro. It also helped practising
our skills for our real production for example by researching information helped to know what we needed to know. It was as if we
were imaging we were a real world product and building an audience with ‘behind the scenes’ content in the planning stages.
Youtube is very helpful and very simple to use. Moreover this source has helped us to upload videos too so that we could embed
onto the blog with no problems.
• Youtube has helped to develop skills such as internet skills by searching different videos, it has especially helped me on developing
how to post videos on youtube in an efficient way because before particularly in AS I found it difficult on how to work on youtube by
posting and uploading videos. Furthermore youtube has has developed our skills such as communicating with the audience because
of the fact that so many people go onto youtube which can broaden our audience and interest.
• However with using youtube, there are many problems that can be associated with this source. For example by posing onto youtube,
anyone can see our production and may create an interest which may not benefit our production. Furthermore by using youtube and
then having to upload videos, copying and embedding onto the blog, it was hard to follow by having to follow all these steps for the
videos to be seen on the school blog which can be seen as a criticism. Another criticism is that the audiences interest may not
benefit from our production. Also that some things could not really be posted on youtube for confidentiality reasons for example our
interview with Alastair Campbell, Huddersfield and Burnley interviewees because of them being an important and influential figures,
but we overcame this problem by having privacy settings but this then does defeat the object of us trying to influence viewers and
having people watch our production.

16. https://www.youtube.com/

17. Final cut pro
• Within planning and evaluation stages we used final cut pro. This is a source that my group used immensely. Final cut helped e
• Consequently final cut pro has been a good source of platform because it has allowed for our group to be individual and unique
• However, final cut pro has had some criticisms because it can be hard to follow and to get everything accurate and exact to how

18. https://www.apple.com/uk/final-cut-pro/

19. How did it help us?
• All these sources of platforms have helped us throughout our planning and evaluation stages because we as a group have used different
sources to portray information in different ways, creating interest and creativity to our work. The use of different platforms have allowed each
member of our group to illustrate each’s individuality and personality to the blog. Also by portraying our personalities it can link into being an
independent production because it is more personal such as like an auteur. This therefore creates a fun and quirky atmosphere that we want to
portray which can integrate within our production of making it our own. We want it to be fun so when reading you are exhibited all the information
but taking in what is being written but in a fun way because of what is beef again interlinking with our production, by being shown information but
responding with what is being said to the viewer, this can suggest the effects theory of the hypodermic syringe theory from where the audience
has been injected with information and are responding to what is being said. However even though we want our blog to be fun it could be argued
that a documentary is serious and not fun so can be argued that the tone of our blog may not be appropriate because we want to be serious
about our production and how we create interest to our production too.
• The most effective source I believe that has been the most effective and impacted the most would be Youtube. This is because I believe
Youtube has been the source that has helped develop the most beneficial skills such as using youtube and communicating. Youtube offers
features such as watching tutorial videos which can affiliate with learning how to do features on youtube. Furthermore the use of imagery
footage that is seen on youtube can help build interest to the production because it is easily captivated by the audience such as the two step
theory. he two-step flow of communication model says that most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn
are influenced by the mass media. This again cooperates with our production because we have many professionals talking about their opinion.
The two step flow helped in the planning stages because we could be seen as being the option leader publicising the information about Burnley
and Huddersfield which gives the topic more exposure than just fans of the club.
• Moreover I believe that Youtube has been a good source of technology to use because it has helped within our planning and evaluation stages
and made our work more organised and has helped with communicating directly to the audience which may be understood more by the
audience too of what information we are presenting. Lastly youtube takes advantage of the unlimited shelf space on the internet to give a
platform for a niche production, this can relate to the long tail theory. The Long Tail Theory (2006 ) by Chris Anderson describes how the Internet
has influenced economics, commerce and consumption. Moreover the theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly
shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward
a huge number of niches in the tail.