The document discusses the various digital tools and online resources used during the research, planning, filming, editing, and evaluation stages of creating a documentary. These included using Google to research documentary conventions, YouTube to analyze documentary styles, and streaming services to identify recent topics. Photoshop, cameras, iMovie, and Prezi were used for planning, filming, editing, and presenting the documentary. Social media like Twitter was used to engage audiences.

2. During the research stages we used the
online search engine Google to help with
finding conventions of a documentary to
understand what practices we should
apply in our own documentary. This
allowed us to narrow the search
specifically for what settings and locations,
lighting and costume, miss en scene,
narrative, characters, icons and sound are
synonymous with the documentary genre.

3. Furthermore the use of YouTube as a major site, which we used
throughout all research and planning stages. It allowed us to search
various styles of documentaries in the planning stages such as Michael
Moore, Louis Theroux as well as large broadcasting house such as
Channel 4 and how that may differ from a BBC or ITV documentary,
allowed us to recognize documentaries similar to our subject matter.
Which again helped to narrow down a style we felt suited our own
ideas, iplayer, 4oD, Demand 5 and ITV player also played a part in this
with recent documentaries as in the case of Doggy Styling and other
pet/dog related documentaries to evaluate what kind of topics had
been recently covered and where/ what route we want to take with
our documentary and which broadcasting house we feel would best
represent our documentary. We were also able to compare ours to the
others; elements intergrated into the documentaries, for example the
hashtag as mentioned later on. Yet another application we used was a
collage app, allowing us to present the findings from YouTube in an
interesting way by using my iPad. The iPad allowed us to use the
Internet to research and plan successfully outside of school hours as it
has Wi-Fi and interacts by touch.

4. Photoshop was especially helpful in producing
photographs for planning our tasks mainly used on the
Apple Mac computer. An example of this was
producing logos, the double page spread, poster and
storyboards. Shannon especially excelled in Photoshop
use due to previous experience and the fact that this is
the career path she hopes to pursue in the future, which
involves many hours on photoshop. Therefore, this was
less of a challenge for our pair as having one member
with experience in this field allowed us to experiment
easily with tools such as blur, sharpening, text, layers and
colour. Planning for the double page spread involved
heavy use of Photoshop along with the planning for the
poster also as we experimented to get the best
outcome.

5. Another media technology we used in the
construction and planning of all tasks was that of
photography and using a Canon DSLR. We used
this digital camera to take not only location shots,
but also photographs of dogs at the Cadbury
Dog Fashion show to The Pet Studio dogs being
pampered. This way we had evidence and
material for our ancillary tasks. We also used an
iPhone to take photographs of ourselves during
the planning, filming and editing stages and
uploaded them to Twitter, as a real up-coming
documentary Twitter page would have evidence
of development to keep audiences engaged.

6. Whilst filming we used a Canon Digital and
Sony HD Video Recording Device along
with a tripod to keep the camera steady,
this also allowed us to pan. When we went
back to re-film we used a microphone
attached to an iPhone for the interview
with Liza.

7. Headphones were also used when recording
the narrative to ensure the sound was isolated
and no background noise was recorded,
allowing us to overlay and have a crisper
quality sound in iMovie-hence the reason we
recorded audio. Similarly we used these
media technologies of an iPhone attached to
the microphone also headphones to record
the sound in our evaluation for questions 1
and 3.

8. Another media technology used in the
filming process was Microsoft Word to
complete the release/consent forms for
Liza and the employees at The Pet Studio
to sign.

9. Robyn excelled in iMovie with the editing
of clips together, isolating audio files from
clips to overlay the separately recorded
microphone audio to produce our final
documentary. Although we both had
input, we found Robyn’s skills worked well
especially when involving iTunes and
sound.

10. Whilst editing our double page spread we
came across the website DaFont where we
could find different fonts that are not
included on a standard computer setup
and iMovie/standard formatted fonts. This
allowed us to explore a variety of fonts
which would best suit each product;
double page spread, documentary,
promotional poster this did not limit us to
standard fonts.

11. In addition we found some royalty free music on
the website incomptech.com which we added to
our documentary. We had to search through
several sites as copy right laws and licensing
meant we could use this music for free.
Incomptech allowed us to choose the genre and
atmosphere which narrowed down our choices.
Both pieces of music were composed by Kevin
MacCleod which we converted on a YouTube
Clip Converter, downloaded to iTunes to be used
in our documentary opening. We similarly used a
clip converter for archive footage: again
YouTube was a valuable source in finding archive
footage during the editing process.

12.  We came across many issues during editing, an example of this
is: we had a problem with the mac system and the format the
footage had been filmed in. iMovie tried to optimise the MP4
files, which meant the upload of all our clips took several hours
to upload. We had to change the video cameras to AVC
settings, which took a considerably shorter time to upload into
iMovie.
 The format of MP4 meant that all of our footage took over 12
hours to upload and we had to leave the footage to upload on
to our computers. Although this was frustrating it gave a better
idea of what filming format to use for any later project,
additionally we learnt about different method of uploading the
footage on mac system to decrease the time the upload would
take for example uploading to the scratch. However the down
side of that is that we would have to use the exactly the same
computer which could cause problems if the computer broke or
we were in a different room. Once uploaded to iMovie this no
longer became a problem.

13. During the evaluation stages we used the
online programme Prezi. This is a web based
presentation application that is able to zoom,
animate and is a more interactive tool than
something such as PowerPoint. It is engaging
with the animations and allows the audience
to explore ideas in a more fun way. We have
used Prezi to evaluate our ancillary tasks in
combination with the main task, allowing us to
present this in a new, exciting way.

14. In addition we used Survey Monkey to get
feedback from our documentary opening
in which we found very effective. It
allowed us to share and ask the questions
we needed to an open audience for
comments. Furthermore, graphs, tables
and bar charts were the outcome of this
online survey and allowed us to construct
an overall view of how our audience felt
about the documentary.

15. During all stages we used the social networking sites that
included Facebook and Twitter. We used Facebook to
announce to our fellow peers that the survey was active for
them to complete and watch. However Twitter was the main
social network we interacted with, updating our ‘tweets’ with
the latest process, filming and editing happenings and ‘re-
tweeting’ relevant subject matters such as the Oscars in
relations to dogs. Twitter was also a form of media to share
our documentary and survey to a wide audience. We have
incorporated the hashtag #poochiemamadoc to allow
tweeters to recognize this hashtag on the documentary
opening and search to see any topics related to it on twitter,
getting younger audiences involved. The hashtag is used to
identify messages associated with this and if this
documentary was to be broadcasted then it could become
a ‘trending topic’.

16. The main media site we have used to
overall research, plan and evaluate is
weebly.com as it has allowed us to present
our beginning stages till the very end. We
have different blogs so each individual’s
will be a various style and allows us each to
show our personalities in this way.