Question 4

Evaluation question 4:
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

In the course of A2 Media, my group and I used several technologies that we either did not have access to or did nto need to use when undertaking our AS project.

In total, the softwares we have used to create our project have been:

- Blogger, the site I am using to host this blog.

- Search engines; Wikipedia, imdb., amazon.com, etc. We used these to research the genre of teen dramas/comedies and find common themes. Wikipedia and imdb gave us detailed synopses of films and pictures of the posters, whereas amazon and play.com linked us to webpages and had the 'interactive' aspect due to consumer reviews.

- YouTube.com, in order to host both our rough cut and our final version of our trailers. We also used the video site for viewing teaser trailers of other, similarly themed films and for finding tutorials on how to use other technologies!

- Photoshop, a complex editing program we used in order to create a professional-looking film poster.

- Adobe PremierePro was the editing software we used to create the trailer.


The main techonological advance for us this year was the use of Photoshop, a programme we had no use for last year, as ancillary tasks are not part of the AS Media project. Because none of my group had ever had any experience with the program, we had to learn how to use it from scratch, which proved more complex than we thought it would be. We were only able to learn how to use more complex functions, such as cutting and pasting the 15 certificate, with the help of YouTube tutorials like the one below. However, once we had watched the tutorials and mastered the more complicated elements, we had very few problems with Photoshop, and found it to be an effective and useful tool in producing our poster ancillary task. We particularly liked the tools available for 'warmifying' the colour tone of the picture, the range of texts available and the fact that we were able to (albeit with initial difficulty!) cut and paste whatever we chose onto the main poster.




YouTube proved invaluable to us during the course of our project. In the pre-production stages, we spent hours trawling the site researching teaser trailers- by watching several of them on the site, we were able to establish common conventions, and by entering specific search terms, we were able to research films with particular themes that we were interested in. Later on, the tutorials proved to be the only way we could make sense of the more complex aspects of Photoshop. Once we'd completed the editing process, we used YouTube to host our videos, and are able to gain even more audience feedback through the site's rating system- viewers are able to 'like' or 'dislike' the video and leave their own comments, and are given the opportunity to share the trailer with friends if they so choose.

The editing software available at our school is Adobe Premiere Pro, as seen in the image above. Unfortunately, we have experiences several problems with the software throughout the duration of the year, as we did last year. Our school computers operate on a limited amount of disk space, and the file size of the Adobe program was only just able to fit onto our systems. Because of this limitation, the program ran exceptionally slowly, and whenever we tried to play our trailer, the clips either would not open or crashed a few seconds into pressing play. We also found similar problems to last year with files disappearing, or sound quality being reduced by the program.

Another problem was that the software was only available on the school computers. A large portion of Media coursework is done at home, and my group felt it may have been easier if the school had opted to use a free program that we would have been able to download in our homes so that we could edit in our own time.

We also had some issues learning to use Weebly.com, the site we used to host our ancllary website. We discovered that we were only able to access the most basic functions of the site without paying a subscription fee, and so were unable to post a playlist of songs as we had previously wanted. However, we did manage to get some of the components we felt were important. Most pivotally of all, we included a link to a Facebook page for the movie, as we noticed with modern films aimed at the 16-24 audience, linking to a social networking site was common. This is a way used by production companies to gain free advertising for their film, as young people in particular use the sites to share information with friends.

We also noticed that many sites included galleries of photos. We liked this idea, as it gave a better idea of what the film was about and the content of it, so we found photos of our actors together, specifically choosing colourful pictures, or ones with amusing content.

Overall, we found the technologies available to us throughout our project to be useful, despite the issues we've had. The most useful tool was one of the simplest; YouTube's tutorials enabled us to find out how to use the other programs to their full effect, and also enabled us to host our own videos.