3. How did you use technologies in the construction and research,

planning and evaluation stages?

By Laurena Etwi

My most frequently used technological platform during my Foundation and Advanced Portfolio was the ‘WordPress’ blog, which was introduced to me by my lecturer as an aid to make my work more accessible.

It enabled him to keep track of my progress through the duration of my media course, which was effective as I was able to receive feedback directly and quickly via posts and comments from him.

In addition to this, having a blog also meant that people who were not just national but also international could access my work and communicate with me through it by commenting on my posts. This allowed me to share my work with a wider variety of people at the same time and this is where the benefits of technological advances were really useful.

Another well-established platform that I used was Facebook, where I shared my trailer on my page to encourage feedback from my Facebook friends.

However people did not respond with any feedback. This is a common risk factor that you may encounter when requesting feedback from people online, mainly due to the fact that you can never be sure that people will respond as online feedback means you rely on volunteers.

Most of my work was done on Apple Mac computers as these are the computers my school provides for its media students, so that high quality work can be produced.Using a MAC computer was a new experience for me and I was therefore not very proficient in using the programs and also not entirely familiar with the way the computers worked. I however developed and became more skilled and confident throughout the duration of my course and I believe to now be a confident user.At the start of my Foundation portfolio I was already familiar with programs such as Word and PowerPoint, and I therefore did not have to practice before using them for my work.Due to the user friendliness of these programs, I used them frequently for presentations and other written aspects of my coursework. As previously mentioned they are simple to use and are in an accessible format which makes them compatible to most computers and even other devices such as PDA's, tablets and Smart phones.

I initially used a Panasonic handy cam to film my trailer, but as this did not give me high quality shots I unfortunately had to re-film all my footage with a different device.

I decided to look into using my iPhone 5 and found that it gave me HD quality shots and worked a lot better than the camera I was initially using. My iPhone 5 was very simple to use as I was already familiar with using it and it was also portable due to its size which made working with it a lot more practical. The HD quality was especially evident in my trailer shots when showing an extreme close-up or zooming with focus and also when in natural lighting as this really complimented the phone’s 8 megapixel camera.

Internet

For my research gathering I used the search engine google, and therefore the internet a lot as I relied on it for finding existing media texts which were similar to the one I produced. Researching was an important aspect of my pre-production especially but also during post-production and by having access to the internet this was a lot easier.

I visited websites such as IMBD and YouTube daily and shared my PowerPoint presentations on ‘Slideshare’, these all require the internet in order to access them. I found it useful to use the internet as one of the ways of conducting research as it so limitless and you can find current and up-to-date information whereas other sources might be out-dated and limited to a certain extent e.g. printed books as they can’t be updates as quickly as the internet .

When it came to editing the trailer, I used iMovie rather than Adobe Premier as I found it easier to understand and work with. I also found that iMovie worked for my trailer as it allowed me to do things like add effects and filters and change the pitches of voice-overs when I felt this was necessary.

This program however required a lot of research, as I did not know how to use it at first. The internet (YouTube tutorials) and help from people around me who did know how to use the program, helped me understand most tools and how to use them to edit my trailer. I did find out after my production that people who used Adobe Premier did have certain advantages, which included a wider variety of transitions, sound effects, texts etc.

iMovie made it easy for me to access my videos when editing as it stored it in an internal library within the software. Exploring my movie was also very simple on iMovie as it even gave me the choice of quality, including phone format, computer format and HD quality and it also gave me the chance to straight away upload it to YouTube if I wished to.

My voice recordings were recorded onto my iPhone and as the Mac was also from Apple I was able to use iTunes to download and import music and voice-overs directly into iMovie. Another privilege of the products both being Apple products, was that sharing of videos, songs etc. was possible through Airdrop, which acts in a similar way as Bluetooth as it is instant and user friendly.

I designed a simple poster with a QR code that I created on http://qrcode.littleidiot.be/ , this was quick and easy and really made use of new media as many people have smart phones in modern society due to the rise in technological advances this has become the norm.

The main reason why I was able to produce all my work to the best of my ability was due to the rise of new media which includes the iPhone I used for filming, the MAC computer for recording for instance my evaluation video and many other sections of my coursework, over all I believe this really gave me an advantage to people who may not have had these technological apparatus.