New media technologies allow for easy access to information from anywhere in the world and encourage interactivity and collaboration. The document discusses how new media is defined by its relationship with evolving technology, images, and sound. It provides advantages like access to expertise through search engines but also disadvantages like lack of reliability and originality in search results. Examples are given of using blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to research, plan, and promote media projects in an accessible, collaborative way.

1. ULTRALON EVALUATION OF
NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES

2. What is ‘new’ media technology
 New Media technology is a 21st century term used
to define all that is related to the interplay
between technology, images and sound.
 New media changes constantly. This is due to the
evolutions of forms of media.

3. Definitions of today’s new
media
 Due to the increase of technology and the inventions of mobile
devices the media has had to keep adapting to these forms of
media.
 Our generation now relies on ‘on-demand’ content. This means we
want to be able to get what we want, when we want. Therefore
media has had to compete with this and updated and have moved
to the on the go content.
 There is also a demand for more interactivity – audiences now
expect to be able to interact with products and with the producer,
often in playful ways.
 This interactivity means there are also possibilities of more
collaboration with others. This can be others across the world as
new media technology means we all live in a small online world.

4. New Media for Research
New media technology for research means that we have
easy access to a vast amount of expertise. We no longer
need to read through books and articles - we can do a
search on the internet.

5. New media has made information global . We
can access all this media information from
anywhere.
Due to the rise of mobile phones, tablets and
laptops, most people are never further away then
a touch of a button from a whole world of online
content.
The internet is a staple in most countries around
the world and with media being positioned
primarily on the internet there are very few, if any
boundaries that would stop an individual
consuming content.
Some production companies even go the extent
of creating different YouTube channels, Twitter
accounts and Facebook pages with the purpose
of promoting the same trailer in different
countries around the world.
Disappearance of Boundaries

6. Advantages of Search Engines
New media is collaborative and interactive
 Our genre could be researched
quickly and easily
 Search engines gave us access to
other collaborative works
 The results from search engines gave
us other layout ideas for our media
products
 For example, there were available
links on the images to websites
containing relevant reviews
 We could filter search to be more
specific e.g. actors and genre

7. Advantages of Search Engines
New media is often free media and therefore democratic
 Film websites were used to search
examples of films within our genre
 We could research the films other
promotional products e.g. posters
and magazine cover
 Research was free to use on the
internet and could be accessed on
different devices
 We could use different filters on the
search engines to refine our
research

8. Advantages of Search Engines
This feature is very typical of the convergence seen in new media as all
kinds of films are now widely available on one website.
 YouTube have hundreds of film
trailers available
 In the movies icon there are
featured channel options that
categorise each genre and lists
them e.g. ‘top selling’
 A useful feature was the
recommendations that
suggested other useful film
trailers similar to our genre

9. Disadvantages of Search Engines
Increasing accessibility and collaboration sounds like a good thing, but is
new media making us all think the same? How much of the potential
information are we actually accessing? Does the volume intimidate rather
than widen our minds?
The disadvantage of search engines is that often
the content may not be reliable or true as what
comes up may not necessarily be written by
someone who is knowledgeable about media
It also eradicates a sense of creativity as often the
top 5 results will be the most commonly clicked on,
meaning people are researching the same thing and
not approaching it from different perspectives.

10. Disadvantages of Search Engines
Volume of information makes any real
cataloguing and filtering almost
impossible.
It can become difficult to find exactly
what you want. Google will bring up
keywords from your search but
cannot read your mind.
Unless you know a specific website
that will give you the answer (e.g.
IMDB or BFI) it is very difficult to find
information you are not sure about
yourself.
For example when we researched
statistics of comedy movies there
were more results for the phrase
“comedy movies” as that is what the
majority of people would want.

11. Disadvantages of Search Engines
New media is changing the concept of ownership over media products. We
are increasingly all producers and consumers (prosumers) and it is harder
and harder for institutions to control and ‘own’ their own products.
If you search for example “The
Inbetweeners” you may not
necessarily click on the movie
trailer and may instead be taken to
the television series. There are
also review videos, fan versions,
mash ups, parodies etc. meaning
you cannot always tell initially
what is “official”

12. New Media for Planning

13. Drawn Storyboard
Storyboards still tend to be drawn by
storyboard artists – this is very old
media and shows we are still in a
transitional phase.
We stuck to ‘old’ media
methods and drew out a
storyboard. This is still
something that happens in
the ‘real’ film industry.
There is a different creative
process at work when
engaged in this kind of
task that cannot be
replicated using new media
technology – or at least,
not as quickly and easily
as using pen and paper.

14. Poster – Mock Up
New media allows for a constant and easy flow between research,
planning and construction.
We researched into film
posters of the same genre as
our film. This lead us to find
posters such as:
After drawing initial
sketches, we created a
mock up poster using the
research we found and
our own photos.

15. Planning magazine covers
New media blurs
the boundary
between
professional and
amateur.
• Researching magazine covers, such as Empire,
made us aware of the conventional features
that appear on this media product.
• We decided to use a colour palette of 3
colours as this convention appeared in
most magazine covers. This is because
we wanted our fonts to stand out above
our background image; we used muted
colours.
• Our initial ideas
for our magazine
cover were
planned on paper
before completing
our final product
on Photoshop.

16. Presenting planning on
Blogger

17. Blogging is very ‘new media’, it
encourages interactivity with
different people, accessibility,
democracy and collaborative
working.
Blogging is Sharing
The blog allowed us to upload and
track our progress over the course.
It also meant we could get feedback
from strangers on our products to
see what to change and adapt

18. Style of Blog Posts
We focused on creating posts that made use of new media
technologies and the blog’s multimedia format illustrating
new media’s relationship with technological convergence.
 We made use of videos to
show a dialogue between
the group and show how we
came to decisions for things
such as our storyboard etc.
 We also used PowerPoint to
present our information and
research in a clear, precise
way that could be read
quickly and with ease.

19. Style of Blog Posts;
Text and Image
 This new media technology also
allowed for greater exposure and
because of technological
convergence, the old way of
presenting work on paper and
DVD was not used and, all the
work could be found in the same
place, the internet
 Blogger enabled us to make use of a
range of formats such as images,
videos and text posts all in one place to
find
 This meant it was easier for people to
view and see our thought process
throughout without having to change
websites etc

20. Accessible to All
Blogging is a very new media tool – collaborative, easily
shared, democratic, allows for us to represent ourselves
• Accessible to all users on the internet
as it is a worldwide blog
• Encourages collaborative work as each
member of the group can publish and
share their own blog posts. This
represents their involvement in the
coursework, through the use of labels
• Blogger was easy to use and
accessible on many devices
• Group members could create,
publish and refer back to posts
at anytime.

21. Work In Progress
 The blog was an easy way to show the progress we were making to our
coursework throughout the year
 Each blog post included the title, time, date and label which allowed us to
refer back to the older posts
 The blog allowed for all of our research and media products to be in one
place, e.g. we took pictures of the work we completed on paper and
published the pictures on the blog

22. • The posts on the blog are in a chronological order to show the progress of our
work
• As an example, we have been able to create posts with various cuts of the trailer as
it has progressed and these have been included on the blog to give evidence for
the progression we have made to improve our coursework
• Having all of our posts on the blog also encourages constant reflection
Work In Progress

23. Viewing Work
 The sharing capacity of new media technology allows work to shared
quicker to enable a greater level of creativity with ease of access to
other blogs as well as our own
 However, this can allow for plagiarism as post can be easily found all
over the web through the use of other new media technologies such
as Google Search

24. Promotional Campaign - Facebook
New media has made promotional tools such as available to firms
and more importantly, free to consumers.
Facebook allows films
to move onto a social
media platform by
creating pages which
have photos and
teasers.
Facebook also has a section called
‘Trending’. This is where production
companies can advertise.

25. Promotional campaign –
Twitter
It is the two-way nature of Twitter (receiving and creating and
redistributing info) that makes it so appealing and successful. It
is a classic new media tool.
Production companies can pay for promotional
tweets. This is where tweets advertising the
production will appear in on the time lines of those
that don’t the production company.
Twitter also has a trending section
where you can see what tweets are
popular at the current time. You can
also pay to become trending

26. New Media for
Construction

27. Photoshop
A lot of new media technology revolves around commercially
available digital packages and sites. Photoshop is not cheap
and is therefore not a good example of new media increasing
democracy.

28. Magazine Cover /
Working in Layers
New media is creating new ways of thinking
– thinking in layers is one of them.
The creation of the
cover is a good example
of the way we learned to
work in layers across
the course. A composite
image is built up from
many layers of text and
images all built on top
of each other and all of
which can be adjusted
individually.

29. Poster Manipulations /
YouTube tutorials
We have definitely improved
over the course of the two years
in using the full range of options
available to us on Photoshop.
For example, we experimented a
lot with layer masks and
blending options in the creation
of our poster. This was difficult
and time-consuming to learn,
and we relied on YouTube
tutorials to learn the basics. This
is a great advantage of new
media – you can teach yourself
almost anything from YouTube.

30. Manipulating Images
Many of the tools and preset
effects can be adjusted and
manipulated to give exactly the
effect you are looking for.
This can be a very fiddly and
time-consuming process with
a lot of experimentation
needed to get the right
combinations.

31. Manipulating Images
Does the reliance on pre-packaged tools
provided by new media products reduce
creativity? Or allow a wider range of people to
be creative?
We were able to add many layers onto our
original image – text, further images,
shapes and so on. This allowed us to create
a professional looking product despite the
fact none of us are particularly artistic.

32. Final Cut Pro
 Final Cut Express is the software we used to edit
our trailer
 Problems we faced with it is that we did not have
it outside of school as the package costs a lot of
money, so we were limited with the amount of time
we could spend on our trailer

33. Trimming, Layering, Ordering
Key functions of digital editing packages are to allow us
to select clips from our footage, trim them to exactly
what is needed, order them in the desired sequence on
the timeline and layer them with other images, audio,
titles, other text etc.

34. Ability to return to original
source material
A key benefit of digital editing over
older methods is the ability to
reverse decisions and return to the
source material which is
unchanged. This encourages more
experimentation and creativity
because changes made are not
permanent and can easily be
reversed.

35. Manipulation of Sound
Final Cut allows audio to be balanced by being able to layer, merge,
adjust length, speed tone of sound and also add various effects and
filters to improve or change the quality of the sound.

36. Use of Storyline
Final Cut Pro X encourages you to edit in a different way to the package
we used previously. Instead of thinking in tracks, clips are instead
attached to a main storyline and cannot easily be moved individually
unless lifted from the line. Because of the nature of trailer editing, we
used music as the main storyline and were able to attach our clips to
this and edit to the rhythm / drum beats.

37. Final Cut and Other
Packages
New media encourages a mixed media approach and one thing that is
important to achieve this is making sure all the different packages you
use are compatible with each other. We were able to use gifs built on
giphy.com layered with a title effect in FCPX to create the ident, while
our end credits were constructed on Photoshop and then imported into
Final Cut where effects were added.

38. Photoshop and Final Cut
 The help section was used to
solve any problems that we
had and was user friendly
 There were lots of tutorials
online on websites such as
YouTube to help with some of
our concerns or to help us to
become more experienced
 Collaborative digital editing
was able occur as our
individual pieces could be
transferred from different
computers
 The software had a large
variety of editing techniques
that we could experiment with
 The software was very expensive
so it could only be accessed at
home and we only use it at
school
 Becoming familiar with the
software was time consuming
because there were a wide range
of tools
 Remembering to use the tick tool
when editing our pieces was
frustrating
 The software sometimes crashed
and work was lost

39. New Media and Evaluation
 The new media technologies and their benefits
allowed for the evaluation of work to be made much
easier

40. Comments Function on Blog
Through Blogger we were able
to receive feedback from
people outside of our school
interested in our product.
Due to the interactivity of
new media we were able to
create a better final piece
based on feedback from
professionals such as The
Picture Production
Company.

41. Comments Function on Blog
 Comments can be seen and made by anyone
 Allowed us to receive feedback on our coursework
products through the comments made on our blog
 Comments were used as an evaluative tool and for
collaborative creativity

42. Label Function
 As we were able to construct our own
reality / persona through the use of
these technologies, the labels then
helped to identify exactly what was
our own to be able to show this offNew media allows us to create
online identities
Labels allowed us to easily search for work on our
blog. You can set the search for the authors name
and any key words through the search bar.
This was a great integration Blogger has as it allows us to see what
posts we have done and we can compare our work to those in our
group.

43. Allows choice of format:
Edited Presentation
Having edited presentations
allowed us to discuss the value of
audience feedback while putting
forward some differing opinions.
Being able to edit it means we
could edit in screenshots and
references if we wanted to, with
additional images illustrating our
points.
Having these images and quotes makes our presentations easier to
watch as if the audience is looking for one piece in particular they can
fast forward to the relevant image.

44. Allows choice of Format:
Power Point Presentation
Not all new media
technologies work efficiently
100% of time
 The use of PowerPoint meant we
could all collaborate as a group at
the same time, specialising in
certain topics that we were more
knowledgeable on so that the
quality was at a higher standard
and it was less time consuming

45.  Presenting ideas around new media technology as a series of group
and individual talks which allowed us to really challenge ourselves on
how we used this technology – we had to think of every angle and
come up with examples of the wider uses and implications of new
media outside of our immediate context. This also encouraged us to
focus more closely around the key concepts associated with new
media such as collaboration, interaction, democracy etc. rather than
focussing solely in the practical uses we made of the technology.
Allows choice of Format:
Group and Individual Talks

46. Allows choice of Format:
Mindmaps / Posters
The use of poster style mindmaps
meant that we could gather a range
of ideas and show things such as our
thought process, inspirations and
also key elements of our products
whilst preparing for more in-depth
analysis.
Without this it would be harder to
present quite sophisticated concepts
in a visual form and with the control
we hop is shown in our longer video
presentations.

47. Allows choice of Format:
YouTube Tutorial
This was a useful way of
presenting our ideas around how
our products complemented each
other and were able to achieve a
distinctive brand for the film. By
giving a tutorial, we were basically
explaining what worked for us. We
were also able to give the ideas a
wider context as most promo
campaigns have more products
involved than we could actually
make.

48. Summary
New media is invaluable for producing media projects. The key benefits
are:
- Collaborative work
- Sharing with a remote community
- Digital technology’s ability to make us all producers
- Availability of information.
Our question marks would be:
- Availability – how available is it really from a global perspective?
- Use – how many of us are really taking advantage of it?
- Creativity – can both enhance and limit this – you have to be careful to
stay creative
- In development – old technology still has a place and at times we found
we preferred making old-fashioned lists and sketching on paper.