Evaluation - Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages?

iMovie was crucial in creating my film as it was the main editing software that I used. It was easy to learn how to use properly which was useful as I hadn’t used the software much previously. Even though it was quite simple it still had a high quality of what you could do to make the film which was good too, although, sometimes I had trouble getting clips uploaded into iMovie and had to get some help though this improved the more I used it.

Photoshop was the most useful tool in creating my two ancillary texts, the film poster and magazine review.

As I have previous experience in using photoshop from both AS media studies and photography I had no problems in using it as my skills in this area were already quite proficient, therefore I did not have to learn anything new.

Blogger was important in my planning and research stages as it was used to write my blog to write about what I was intending to do and useful research that could help me with my film.

As it was so easy to access it meant my target audience could see it to help give me feedback on ideas. It also meant I was able to get on the blog from wherever I was at any time if ever I thought of something that I could update or add.

I used an SLR Camera to film as it meant I could film in a much higher quality as opposed to an older video recorder.

The camera I used was a Nikon D5100 which was good as I could use it for taking the images for my poster and review as well as just filming.

Another positive to using this SLR was the fact I could adjust all the different settings to get different results depending on the light and other conditions. The film came out at a much higher HD quality as a result of using this camera.

The only negative thing about it was I was not used to that specific camera and it took me a while to get an understanding of how to set it up and use all the features.

Vimeo and Youtube were both very important for both the research stages and filming stage.

I used them both to find short films that I could use as inspiration and to find out more about what you might expect to see in a short film.

Youtube was also very useful for distributing my film. Being possibly the biggest website in the world for watching videos, I thought it was the best place to share my film. I could use it to show people in my target audience my film and get it out so anyone could find it if they wanted.

Youtube also has a comments section on videos where people gave me feedback on the film.

Dafont.com was a very helpful website in creating the fonts for the logo of my film, poster and review.

It had a huge selection of different, unique fonts to choose from that would fit in with the genre of my film and look like the sort of thing you would expect from a horror movie.

The fonts looked very professional and were easier to find than if I were to simply look through the preset fonts on photoshop, hence why I used it for my logo and title.

Facebook was used to send my video to people so I could get their feedback on what they thought of it.

It also was useful to communicate with the actors to plan when everyone was available to film as well as talking to some other students to discuss ideas.

I used slideshare to present some of my work on my blog. It looked far neater and more professional, making work easier to find and check through.

The only downside was if I needed to change anything I had to go back to the presentation on powerpoint and then upload it again once it had been amended.

Wordle was another website which had a different way for me to present my work.

It creates a collection of words that I chose to add into a brainstorm type thing showing things that could be associated with the genre of my work.

To conclude, I used a large array of digital technology products throughout the duration of my A2 course, some far more important than others, for example, using a Mac computer for the whole thing was much more important than using wordle.

Some of the technology I used could have been changed such as the use of an SLR, which was not too important and I could have used a standard video camera instead however I thought this was best.

Overall, most of the technology I used had its own use in different ways to help me improve in every aspect of the course.