The document discusses the various media technologies used at different stages of creating a documentary project. In planning, the group researched online and watched similar documentaries on YouTube for inspiration. Microsoft Word and Excel were used to design questionnaires and analyze responses. Equipment like digital cameras, video cameras, and microphones were used to film interviews, reconstructions, and vox pops. Adobe Premiere was the primary software for editing video and audio. Photoshop was used to design print advertisements. PowerPoint, mobile phones, and blogs were utilized for evaluation and sharing the final work.

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

2. In the research and planning stages of our project we used the internet to research our topic of phobias so that we could gather statistics to use in the documentary. We also looked at other similar documentaries on youtube to gain ideas for the type of things we could include and the way they used voiceovers and voxpops and also what type of questions to use when interviewing people for our documentary, and the mise en scene that they used. We also researched channel 4 print adverts using the channel4 creative website (shown below) so that we could get an idea of the way that channel 4 usually set out their advertisements, e.g. the colour, text and positioning. This website shows a variety of different adverts, meaning that we had a lot more things to draw ideas from.

3. We used Microsoft Word to create the questionnaires that we distributed to gain the public’s opinions on documentaries in general; we then used Microsoft Excel to present our findings in graphs so that we could compare different people’s answers. We used a digital camera to take pictures of us filming and editing to make a record of the filming and editing process, and we also used the digital camera to take the pictures we used in our print advert. We also briefly used a compact video camera to record 3 interviews with the public, to get their thoughts on documentaries and our ideas.

4. For the construction of the documentary we used a DV camera, tripod and a microphone to film the material of our documentary, this includes the voxpox’s, interview with the psychologist, reconstruction and interview with the lactophobiac. We used the tripod to make the shots steady and to avoid any shaking and the microphone so that the sound was clearer, although when we went to refilm the psychologist the microphone wasn’t working, so we had to make sure the surrounding sounds were as quiet as possible and that Elizabeth White spoke clearly, although this isn’t very noticeable in the documentary. We also used the camera to record the voice over for both our documentary and our radio advertisement, and we then cut out the video footage and just used the sound.

5. We used Adobe Premiere to do all of the editing of the production, which gave us the ability to cut all of our shots more thoroughly and so that we could move everything around into the correct places, we also used different transition effects in our documentary, such as fade to black. And we also used titles to introduce the different people being interviewed which we also used transitioned effects on, so that it wouldn’t just suddenly flash up, it would look more professional. This shows the fade to black effect, and how we added it.

6. We also used Adobe Premiere to create our radio advert, which then made it possible for us to adjust the sound settings on some of the voices to make them more sinister to go with the theme of it. I thought Adobe Premiere was quite easy to use when you knew what you were doing, and because we had previously used it the year before it wasn’t too hard to remember everything again. It made the editing process a lot easier because we had the ability to move everything about freely and have different layers of sound and video. This shows how we edited the sound, and the adjustments that we made.

7. We used the radio study to re record some of our voxpox’s that were supposed to be taken from our documentary, because some of the sound wasn’t clear and it made the radio advert sound messy and it wasn’t very nice to listen to, so the rerecording’s were a lot clearer and made our radio advert a lot smoother. We also used Photoshop to create our print advert. I was already familiar with Photoshop because I have experience with photography and graphics, which made creating the print advert quite simple as I already knew how to do most of the things. Although because we didn’t have much time to create the print advert, our ideas weren’t that strong and we had minimal time to collect the images that we needed, which meant that we created a few different unsuccessful print ads, and in the end we just went for a simple idea.

8. In my evaluation I have used Microsoft PowerPoint and slideshare to upload it to the blog, I have also used my mobile phone the record both the audio answer and the video answer. And I also used blogger to create the blog to present all of my work on.