Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Many technologies were used in this project.  Throughout the research and planning stages, the internet played a major part in our progress, from this website, blogger.com, for example, which enabled us to easily document our findings and progress to Google Images, to illustrate our findings.  Sites such as Scribd transcribed our Word/Publisher documents for viewing on the blog.  Thanks to the internet we found a site that let our Powerpoint documents be viewed on the blog also: slideshare.net.  This was very helpful as it meant we could display our work in another different format.  On-demand websites, YouTube and television meant we could watch pre-existing soaps to analyse in order to know what we needed to include in our own soap opera and inspire us.  In these planning stages we also experimented with some of the programs on the Mac to decide what software we like the best and the results we got from them.  We used GarageBand to create our own music tracks which we could've used as the backing of our trailer, however we didn't use these in the end as we preferred the pre-exsiting, non-copyrighted sounds in iMovie.  To create the poster and magazine I experimented with Photoshop to see what effects I could create and gain some more experience with it.  A scanner was used as a way of getting some written documents, such as the draft storyboard, onto the blog.  For the animatic and photographic storyboard we used Movie Maker to put them together before uploading them to YouTube, in order to get access to them and upload them to our blog. 

The camera we used to film our trailer

We edited our trailer on an Apple Mac

The construction of our media texts (trailer, poster and magazine) was very hands-on and involved the use of a video camera (HD Panasonic) to film the trailer and a Mac and iMovie to edit the footage together.  We also used YouTube as a way of distributing our trailer.  From here we could embed the trailer onto our blog.  An SD card was used to store the clips and a USB/memory stick was used to store our  trailers on before uploading to YouTube (and as a back up, in case anything went wrong on the Mac). In the end, I used Publisher to design the layout of our poster and magazine due to the ease of moving images and adding text/effects, however I chose to use Photoshop to crop out backgrounds from images which gave a professional outcome.  I sourced the Channel 5 logo, on the poster, from the internet.  I used photographs from a Nikon D3100 and stills from the clips filmed on the Panasonic video camera for on the magazine as I knew we couldn't use copyrighted images from the internet.  When looking for feedback on our trailer, magazine and poster we uploaded them to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  This way, we got non-biased feedback as it wasn't from only our friends/families but strangers.  Without new media we would be unable to receive feedback as easily and effectively as we did.

MovieMaker was a quick and easy way to edit evaluations;
it was also surprisingly effective.

Again, Blogger was used for the initial drafts of my evaluations.  Movie Maker was a good way of animating them where I could use video clips and image montages.  I could also do a voiceover, as I have for Question 1 of the evaluations where I did a 'director's commentary' on the Mac over our trailer.  For Question 2, I filmed myself, using my HD Nikon D3100, as I spoke about my media texts.  I have found that Movie Maker was actually the best format for getting my point across as I could add pictures and videos, voiceovers and sound and I didn't feel I was restricted.  However, since using Prezi for Question 3, I have found it is even easier to do these things mentioned than on MovieMaker.  I am enjoying Prezi - it looks very modern, professional and I like the way it 'flies' between sections.  You can also easily go back to linking screens and input different formatted media into the presentation easily (such as YouTube videos, PDF documents and images).  On reflection, without new media, we couldn't have created this project as easily as we have.  Without it, tasks would have been more lengthy and a struggle to complete.