Question Four.

How did you use new media technology in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

While filming our coursework we used the HDx5 Canon, just one of the many new media technologies used while creating our project.

We first began with pitches, treatments, and experimenting with interesting ways to portray a storyboard. We began focusing on a visual aspect from the off. As we decided to create a photo storyboard with a still digital frame camera, allowing us to be creative with shots and allow those who we are pitching to, to get a real understanding of how we wanted to portray our project. This allowed us as a group to get together and on such programmes as Microsoft word and publisher, allowing us to upload photos and brainstorm around them with arrows etc, gave this project a real professional feel and helped with our attitudes towards the project and we remained extremely professional which I believe was the key to success. This allowed us to create a base for our project, to form ideas and alter our ideas to create belief in ourselves and allowing others to have belief in our project, this was all via a photo storyboard, which we used on the day of filming, proving to be extremely important.

As for Blogger, where we would store all of our work, we could use a variety of programmes, such as you could publish work on either Publisher or word in for example when we created our magazine reviews, I used power point as it was easy to use and worked extremely well. Blogger made it extremely easy to upload work, images and videos shot by our group regularly on the ‘Iphone 4’, using a lead connecting to the phone and to the computer created by ‘Apple’ it was quick and the videos of us talking about our work was of a very good quality. You could also upload such links from Youtube, and moodboards, which I used Prezi, a fantastic internet programme where online you could show you work in a very interesting way, rather than just having simple words, which I believe looks daunting to read and it made it more appealing. On Prezi you could involve video links, text and even images from your film and your J-PEG quality posters. Blogger, being a social network, allowing other people to talk about and rate your work, It gave me the idea to publish tweets, and status on Facebook and Twitter, marketing our film, edging people to view it, creating word of mouth, so our project would be viewed as many times as possible.   Blogger was something we always referred back to throughout all stages of production. Blogger allowed you as an individual to be creative and show your own personal beliefs connecting to your project.  Blogger is a fantastic tool, leaving very little to the imagion, as it allowed you to be creative and was a fantastic way to present your work to others. Blogger allowed you to publish posts that others could comment giving you feedback, allow you easy access to the work of others to compare with your own and also allowed you mainly to show your work in the best way possible. Blogger was fantastic, however the main use a technology was obviously the internet, which was used for all our production and throughout our research.  The internet made it possible for us as young amateur film makers to be creative and show everyone what our film would be about, such as it allowed us to post videos from sites such as Youtube, allowed us to watch other films to gather ideas and also express ourselves personally through our film by using such websites as slideshare.com and Prezi.  

Within editing we used a great deal of new media technology. For example we began by using a lacie drive, in order to transfer our film, from the Cannon camera, to the computer, and finally onto Adobe Premier. We would then capture the project and digitise when necessary, adding affects such as ‘ghosting’ and ‘dissolve’. Evidently we would cut material when finalising the piece, ready for rendering, the transfer between Abode Premier and other software, such as Youtube or onto dics. While editing many groups had problems with sounds, however due to our use and familiarities with such equipment as the boom microphone, when editing our sound quality was more than presentable. However as a group we did indulge in some sound mixing, such as when we altered the voice over to allow us to have a good view, and the correct shots, and also have good quality of sound when dialogue was used, allow the audience to fully understand the narrative. While we introduced music, we created our own, named ‘JimBob’ which was a remixed, slowed down version of the tradition ‘Happy Birthday’ song, we did this using a dictor phone. The software within Adobe and Gimp 2.0 was fantastic, it did not only let us add such things as effects, speed up and slow down our rushes, shots on our timeline, but allowed us to change colours by ‘dipping’, showing high key lighting and removing low key lighting to create the whole out look upon the scene. We did this for example in the shot where the mother, ‘Sarah’ looked under the bed to find the diary of her son, which was originally, was very low key. However we changed this to high key lighting as we wanted to show a metaphorical message that when she found the dairy the outlook on life would change. This made these programmes fantastic and after practice become easy to use and these programmes where professional and without them I believe our project would not have been as successful.

Photoshop was a fantastic tool in order to create our posters and review for our project. My review was majority created through the use of Power Point as it was far simpler and was looked very similar to the magazine I used in order to portray my magazine, GORILLA Magazine.  Although during pre-production, filming and editing we used a great deal of new media technology, however in post-production was the time where you as an individual you could really experiment with different programmes, pieces of equipment and fantastic technology. Going onto marketing and distribution, I began creating posters to allow the target audience to get a real feel of the piece before that actually witnessed it first-hand. When creating the posters I decided to use Photoshop and Gimp 2.0 to make my photos look as professional as possible. I created three posters in all, two billboard and a magazine poster which I used a A4 canvas. Within Photoshop you could add images, flipping and rotating them allowing you to get them exactly where you wanted too. When in place you could pull whatever you wanted out of the image to make its own individual image, you could do this by simply going around the object or individual using the ‘magnetic lasso’ or the ‘magic wond’. You could then crop your image to a smaller size for example, change colours either using the ‘bucket tool’ or right click and click fill background. You could even duplicate images and layers so it would give extra graphics and effects to work with to see if they worked. Photoshop made it so simple for you to alter saturation of an image and to insert text to get the best out of your poster to attract your target audience to watch the project I had just created. Finally using either GIMP 2.0 or Photoshop you could filter your image, and flatten it into a J-PEG image, creating an extremely professional look, so it could not be altered as if you had laminated you work. For the images we used for the posters we either took screen grabs from our film, or we would use a digital still camera in order to take shots easily and would convert them to our computer by using a USB.