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

In this post I will be answering my fourth evaluation question.

Evaluation Question Four

There are so many new pieces of technology that we use in our media course, I'll be posting a Prezi with some of them in and then developing on my points.

So in the Prezi above I've just mentioned some of the pieces of technology that we use the most, now I will talk about the ones that we used less frequently and what stages they were used in. 

Research

This is the research that was done before our filming and our ancillary products. 

Storyboard Quick

This was only used for creating our animatic, this basically allowed us to insert and choose pictures and locations to use and make a small "mock up" of our film to see how it should look, it also allows you to add a soundtrack to it, we used this to create our animatic, which is shown below. 

 

Sony HD Camera

This is the camera that we had used previously to film other products, we didn't use it for filming our short film though, however we did use it for one of our techniques, which was slowing down the footage that we had, we used this for our smashing glass scene. Here are our test shots that we did before filming for our actual scene.

Slide Share

This software is available online and we used it for uploading presentations that we made and them embedding them onto our blogs, for example, I've used it for deconstructing movie posters and looking at their conventions and them uploading them onto my blog. 

This has been a very useful piece of software when wanting to show presentations on our blogs. I have quite a few of these in my ancillary tasks and evaluation, here is one I used for presenting a deconstruction of film posters.

Planning

This is the planning that went on before filming and constructing our ancillary products.

Scribd 

Scribd was used in the planning stages to present various documents for filming, we posted things like our shooting schedule, risk assessment and our props list, this has also allowed us to print and take documents like these out filming with us to enhance the filming experience. 

Quark Xpress

We used Quark Xpress when prepping to do our ancillary tasks, we all created a magazine review and a magazine front cover, for films of our choice to prep us for creating our real products, below are the ones that I created. 

Construction

This was the construction of our film and our ancillary products.

Equipment 

We used different piece of equipment in our filming process, one being the camera we used for the majority of filming, Canon 600 DSLR. We used this camera because it was more portable than the Sony HD camera that we used in previous filming, this was needed as we would be filming outside and on the go for most of the film, for example, the scene on the train platform was easier to film since there was a part where the camera was handheld to create a shaky and rushed feel.

We also used this camera since it had certain features that we needed that were better than that of those on the Sony camera, for example, the depth of field that we used for focusing on the pen in one scene. 

The dolly and the tripod were other pieces of equipment that we used in the filming process, one scene that the dolly came in handy was when our protagonist is walking towards the camera and her love interest is entering the hall behind her, the dolly was needed so we could keep our protagonist in the shot but have the attention on her love interest. 

The tripod was used to keep our shots stable in scenes where it could have been difficult, for example, the tripod was placed on the dolly to keep it stable as it moved.

To create our ancillary products we used Quark Xpress to create our ancillary products, this gave us the opportunity to learn a new piece of software and make our products look professional. 

We then used Scribd to host our products, this allowed us to post it a different way that just on our blogs. 

This is how our movie posters and magazine reviews looked in Scribd.

YouTube

YouTube is the main distribution center for our films and other videos that we've done, like rough cuts, feedback and little example clips for evaluation questions. 

YouTube also allows us to easily embed videos onto our blogs so people could see it and we could also send links to people who want to see our films or who we wanted to see our films. 

Below is a video that talks about other aspects of YouTube and it's features.

Evaluation

In the four evaluation questions that I am have been doing I have used different pieces of software and technology.

YouTube is one of the things that I've been using, mostly for little clips from our film for examples in my first evaluation question, this also ties in with another piece of software that I've been using which is Windows Live Movie Maker, which I use to edit and find certain parts that show conventions of romance films. 

Another piece of software that I used in evaluation is Prezi, I've used this to talk about each piece of technology that we have used in our filming and in talking about our audience feedback.

Prezi is an easy way to make interesting presentations that we can embed onto our blogs instead of just typing up our answers. 

Slide Share was also used to post deconstructions of film posters in question two, to talk about the conventions of the movie posters.

A final piece of software that I used is QuickTime, this was to create a screen cast for the second evaluation question, the screen cast showed our film and talked about certain parts of it like the ident and camera angles.

This is my final evaluation question and overall I am very pleased with how well everything turned out and how good it looks and am very happy with how professional our ancillary texts look.