How did you use new media technologies in the research, construction, planning and evaluation stages?
As a whole there were a lot of different media technologies which I used to present all of the the stages throughout the process. To start I shall discuss all the different technologies I have used during the research.
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| Here is a collage of all of the product used in the research stages. |
2) Slide Share - This piece of software online came in handy as it enabled me to share any presentations onto the blog. One of the things I used this for was the presentation which I used to explain my film idea, I believe it was necessary to put this on my blog as it allowed people to look through the presentation more clearly while i talk about it as it wasn't very clear in the video. Another thing i used it for was to display the conventions which are shown in the 'IN CINEMAS' magazine review in 'Empire'. A problem witht his software is that if you were to insert any videos, sound or hyperlinks, they would no longer work and would just look like a picture to an viewer. Here is a screen shot of all of the presentations I have hosted on Slide Share to post on the blog.
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| http://www.slideshare.net/ho1mes1996 |
3) Soundtrack Pro - All the sound in the animatic was created using this programme this helped give the audience and idea of what was happening in each still as the images wouldn't make sense alone as it doesn't show any movement in the shots, therefore the software enables us to achieve the movement in shots through the use of footsteps and other folio sounds. Once we created the soundtrack we would then attach it the the sequence in Final Cut. We didn't seem to have many problems with this apart from the fact it is very time consuming. Here is a screenshot showing us editing the sound on Soundtrack Pro.
4) Blogger - Blogger has given a platform in which we can display all of our work allowing us to create better ways to present it, increasing the creativity. This technology has also made it much easier to do coursework as it is all done online where we can embed relevant pictures, videos, audio, etc. A problem which I have seemed to have with the evaluation questions in particular with this technology is resizing videos but apart from this Blogger has been very useful for our posts. As you can see I was also able to personalise this blog to my own preferences changing backgrounds and colours.
5) Photoshop - This was used in the research of the ancillary products when we were developing our skills and showing our use of the conventions in different products as we created a magazine front cover. For the cover I used Photoshop to create both the title and the create different layers to put the focus of the image in the background over the title, to follow conventions closely. A negative to this software is that it isn't simple to use if you haven't had any previous experience hence why I did most of the photoshop work as I have used photoshop a lot. Here is an example of how I used photoshop to edit our movie poster.
6) PhotoBucket - I have used this to post photographs which i had taken on my phone onto the blog as it was the easiest and quickest way to upload and embed the photos. These photos would include the one of the research post order and the 'shooting on location' photographs. This has made posting photos from my phone easier as I can share them on this site and then download or embed them. If I embedded them though it wasn't always successful so the embedding isn't brilliant on this software but it is a great hosting website.
7) Prezi - I used Prezi for the animatic post as I felt like I needed to use a different way of presenting my blog posts. I thought this would be ideal as you can include multimedia in the presentation which you can't otherwise do on Microsoft PowerPoint. Therefore I can include videos, sound recordings, links,etc. I used this for both my animatic and I am currently creating one for this evaluation question. All in all this is easy to use but can be time consuming and frustrating when creating the navigation. Here is the Prezi I created for my animatic.
8) Storyboard Quick - This was used for the animatic only. It allowed me to add characters to the pictures i took in the three locations from the storyboard and then upload them as storyboard frames and add people to the photographs. I personally wouldn't use this to create a whole story board from scratch as the amount of things you can do is limited with not enough locations, avatars, etc. This is a piece of software which is shown in the animatic as i took the pictures and inserted the avatars.
9) YouTube - This was the most ideal way to host videos and also embed videos as uploading the videos straight from the Mac to the blog wouldn't work. To over come this I hosted the videos on youtube and then embedded them from there. A negative about embedding from youtube is that you cannot resize them easily on blogger as it is different to resizing pictures which is much easier. Here is a screenshot of all the YouTube videos I have created for our project.
10) Microsoft Word/PowerPoint - Word was used for making any documents which are seen on the blog. One document which was created on this for example was the film treatment. this software allowed us to created a treatment just like ones which i had found on Google images so we had the same style and could follow all the general conventions which you would usually see. PowerPoint was used to create my presentation about my film idea. This was helpful when I tried to explain my film pitch to my peers.
11) Sound Cloud - This was used for an audio recording when I read out the treatment. This is helpful as it gave me another way to present the work some people prefer to read, others prefer to listen so this enabled me to give the variety to suit some peoples preferences. Here is the voice recording I did of myself reading out our film treatment.
12) Sony HD Camera - We used this camera to test out different ways of slowing down the footage. Using this camera we found out that there is a slow-motion setting which processes the clip automatically on the camera by increasing the number of frames. This camera gave us a variety of choice when deciding how we were going to film the slowed down parts of out film (the smashing glass). Before shooting on location we decided to test this mode on the camera and created a video showing the comparison between the slow motion mode on the camera and slowing it down on Final Cut.
13) Quark Xpress - Quark express was used for the research of the ancillary products as it helped broaden our knowledge on this new software and helped us create a professional looking film review and poster for our own film. This product is similar to photoshop as it takes a while to learn all the different tools but we used a youtube tutorial to give us an idea of all the basics. Here is the tutorial we used and also the film poster I made after following it to see if I could develop my skills even further.
14) Scribd - This is where you can share all the documents you have created so that you can embed them onto the blog. Therefore this has enabled us to be able to get all the documents we have created on to our blogs without having to alter it in any way. One thing I used it for was to embed our film treatment to show the conventions I had included as it is a professional document. Here is an embedded copy of the treatment.
15) Keynote - This is another piece of software for making presentations and I used this to create the presentation which I showed at the start of the course when I was talking about my film idea and pitching it to the rest of the class. This helped me get the story line across and made it much more easier for the group to understand the concept. Here is the video of me talking about the idea with the presentation in the background.
This is the last evaluation question and all in all I would say the whole process of making the film and both the ancillary products has been reasonably easy with barely any problems encountered. All of this was made easier and more possible with all of the different technologies which were available to us.
To show all the software which helped with the construction stages I have created a Prezi which should help display new technologies more clearly through pictures, video and sound.
Distribution, Sharing and Embedding Stages
One of the most obvious technologies we have used in this process is YouTube. YouTube is the largest video hosting website on the internet and to prove this I have found a video which gives you an idea of why we have chosen this to host all of the videos created in our Production.
So YouTube boasts all of these great features but for us it has enabled us to share all of the videos created including production team discussions, rough cuts, final cuts, animatics, etc. Another useful feather of YouTube is that you can easily embed videos from YouTube onto our blogs which made it much easier to post but a downside to this is it can take a long time for our longer videos to upload and can therefore be time consuming. Also we could invite people to watch our film through our YouTube link and were able to also share it with anyone else who would stumble across it.
Other pieces of technology which came unhandy were those which enabled us to post and embed documents, presentations and soundtracks onto our blogs as blogger cannot host these alone. A site we used for documents was Scribd. this website allows users to host documents on their site for free, once you have posted this on the site you can then easily create an embed code and alter it to your own preferences or needs. Here is a screen shot of the embedding options which Scribd gives.
From this you can see that you can alter the size of the embedded document. decide which pages you want to be showing first and also how you want the viewer to navigate through your documents. As our review in this screenshot was only one page the navigation wasn't important.
The site we used to host our presentations on was Slideshare. This did the same as Scribd but for presentations where you could still keep the format of your presentation when posting. A negative of this is that you cannot see any animation just stills of each slide one after the other. This was still very useful though as I created a few presentations which needed to be posted onto my blog and this enabled this so that I could then embed it quickly with no fuss.
The final piece of embedding technology was Sound Cloud which I used to host, share, embed and create any sound recordings. The embeds from this site had a nice layout which looked rather appealing. I chose this over other technologies as I was much more familiar with it and therefore found it easy to use and less time consuming.
Evaluation Stages
I have created a presentation showing all the technologies in the evaluation stages of our film production process.
This is the last evaluation question and all in all I would say the whole process of making the film and both the ancillary products has been reasonably easy with barely any problems encountered. All of this was made easier and more possible with all of the different technologies which were available to us.
