EVALUATION: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
BLOG
I believe I used my blog on Tumblr effectively to document the planning, research and progress of my A2 Media Coursework over the course of the year.
Hyperlinks
My use of hyperlinks within posts has made it simple to investigate the source of a text, and gives the text more credibility. Some hyperlinks I have used include the link to my coursework partner's Blogspot consistently; links through to magazine websites if mentioned, as well as the IMDB's of films I wrote about. See below:
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I think the design of the blog is attractive and simple to read - I chose a black and white masthead background photograph of Liverpool Street station during the 1930's to tie in with the ongoing theme and so the red, white and blue imagery in the posts would stand out even more. An 'Archive' link lets you jump to months quickly to avoid scrolling backwards in time (see second image).
Image
I believe my use of graphics and imagery has been consistent on the blog. It supports the text and makes the blog more interesting and attractive to read. Whether it be to help demonstrate an opinion or to document influences and ideas, the use of image has been significant to the blog.
A look at some images used to demonstrate our interest in the Realism genre.
My blog icon - it is consistent with the London theme of the production.
It also was useful in demonstrating myself and Georgia's work progress, to give an insight into production and design.
Tagging
The ability to tag posts with relevant keywords made it easy to search for different post topics and label them with simple information. Tagging is something that in present day social media is the norm, and makes the search process within websites more efficient.
Tumblr's dashboard is helpful in that it gives you the opportunity to easily post anything from links, to video to images. The only limitation I found with Tumblr was that I couldn't include videos within text posts like I was able to include images.
CAMERA
Construction: Filming
We used a Sony Handycam to capture our short film. This meant it was small, light and efficient and meant that because we were travelling around London and had a lot of moving around it was easy to work with, but after beginning to edit the footage we realised just how much we had compromised on video and audio quality. We encountered a lot of background noise from traffic that the lower quality microphone in this camera had trouble with. Although the video quality isn't terrible, it is quite average. In my next production I would want to upgrade on the camera quality.
The Tripod we used helped us keep a steadier picture in longer or more awkward shots such as 'Nan writing out the birthday card'.
We didn't use the tripod excessively as a feature of the realism genre is a 'handheld camera' feel to the filming. This is seen in 'Love, Honour and Obey', a film we were very much influenced by, and seen clearly in this particular scene.
SOFTWARE
Adobe Photoshop CS6
We used Adobe Photoshop to design and create the promotional poster for 'A Day in the Life'. Photoshop was great because we knew we could create almost anything we wanted. Due to the fact that we wanted a minimal design, we did not use a lot of 'effects', and instead concentrated on alignment, layout and fonts. We used around 30 layers in the design and used standard tools like 'crop' and 'eyedropper' to erase the real station names.
Adobe InDesign CS6
We used Adobe InDesign to create our magazine article, which was great as the program is simple to use and gives you at lot of freedom to be creative with your design. The 'place' tool was used to arrange our header and columns, and the text tool for our text boxes. The preview option was helpful in giving us an idea of the finished product. The review was first written out on Microsoft Word and copied onto the article at a later date for clarity. Difficulties with the design included text placement and sizing, but we achieved the design we wanted in the end.
Final Cut Pro 7
To edit our film 'A Day in the Life' we used Final Cut Pro 7 on an iMac. Tools we used included 'pen' to manipulate the sound levels, 'razor' to cut our clips to their desired length and 'text' to create our titles and credits. With effects we used video filters called 'fish-eye', 'radial blur' and 'refraction' for the drug montage. I enjoyed using Final Cut Pro as is allowed us to edit our short film in considerable detail, and we could use really effective filters and colour manipulations that wouldn't have been possible without this specific program. The only limitation I found to have with FCP7 was the need to render every minute or so, but this couldn't be helped.
