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

I used a variety of new media technologies in the planning, researching, production and evaluation stages of my project.


Research
For my research stages I used Internet (mainly google) to look for magazine covers, film posters and to get information on my chosen genre, I used microsoft word to create a questionnaire for my audience research and I used microsoft excel to create graphs displaying the results for the questionnaire.

Microsoft Excel

I used excel to create graphs displaying the results of my questionnaire. Excel was good to use as there was a variety of different types of graphs to choose from, I picked graphs which were most suitable for the type of results I was displaying, if I wanted the figures to be known by the people looking at the graphs i'd use a bar chart as it places values at the side, and if I didn't mind then i'd use a pie chart which gives a visual representation on which results were more common than others. One bad point with using excel is that I used the most recent version of it at college whereas at home I have the 2003 version, on the new version I didn't know how to add a title to the graph so instead I had to write a caption by it to indicate which question the results were from which was a bit annoying.

Internet

I used the internet during the research stage to find movie posters, movie magazines, teaser trailers and to research my genre to find out the main conventions. I also used to internet to listen to copyright music and sound effects to find some for my own trailer. When using the internet to research I had to be careful about the sites I was using as sources of information as sometimes it cannot be reliable, for example Wikipedia is not a very reliable source for information so when researching I had to be careful and ensure I didn't use this site as well as other potentially unreliable ones. Another problem I come across is that when I was doing my research is that when I was trying to find a list of horror movie conventions I couldn't find one on the whole internet so I had to formulate a list myself based on what I had seen in teaser trailers and horror films i've watched before. A good point in using the internet is that it is more or less always quite fast and everything you need is in one place.





Word

I used microsoft word to create my questionnaire which I handed out to 10 people. Microsoft word was ok to use however I did face a limitation in my design.

Planning
For my planning stages I used microsoft word to create my storyboard and other things and I used a digital camera.

Digital Camera

I used my camera in the planning/ post production stage to take pictures for my magazine cover and for my poster. I also visited the locations which I had in mind for filming my trailer and took pictures of them in order to write about them. This camera was good to use as it had a powerful flash and when I was taking the images I was in a dark location.





Microsoft Word

I used microsoft word to create the template for my story board word was good to use as it was easy to draw the table as there was a drop down menu where I could choose how many columns and rows I wanted my table to have which saved time, it was also easy to resize the columns and add more rows.








Production
For the production stage of my work I used a lot of different softwares, I used Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Windows Movie Maker, Paint and a Digital camera all to create my media products (trailer, magazine cover and poster).

Photoshop and Paintshop Pro

I used photoshop to create the magazine front cover. Photoshop was good to use as it is flexible and has a wide range of colours to use and fonts, also when resizing a photo on photoshop it doesn't cause it to go pixelated. Photoshop would sometimes stop responding so I’d lose everything that I done. So I made sure after that I saved after every little thing I done to avoid having to start all over again. I used paintshop pro to do my movie poster, I have paintshop pro at home so I use it regularly and found it easier to use than photoshop which is probably the reason why my poster is better than my magazine cover. I think that I should        have used 'In Design' to create my magazine front cover so that it would have looked more professional. I think paintshop pro was a good choice for my poster as it allowed me to edit it accordingly to fit the genre.

Editing done on paintshop pro which wouldn't have been achievable using 'in design'






















Windows Movie Maker

I used windows movie maker to make my teaser trailer. Originally I wanted to use 'Adobe Premier Pro' but when I imported my video clips to it they wouldn't play it would just be black so I had to use Movie Maker. Using movie maker meant that I was limited with what I could do. It would often freeze and make me have to restart my laptop but luckily it automatically saved my trailer so I could recover it after. I believe my trailer could have been better if I used premier pro however movie maker was ok as it did allow me to edit brightness, contrast etc of the clips and had lots of different transitions I could use.

Paint

I used paint to save the print screens I look of the editing process and more. Paint is easy to use and it was easy to crop out anything I didn't want to be in there and to resize it. I also had a choice of which file type I wanted to save the image as.














Digital Camera




I used my digital camera in the process to film new clips to add to my trailer during the production process. This camera I used was good as the zoom is good and the quality of the video is good.

Evaluation
When answering my evaluation questions I didn't use too much technologies I used the internet to retrieve pictures of software logos and I used blogger


Blogger




I used blogger throughout my whole project, any work I did was uploaded onto blogger. The bad thing about blogger is that sometimes it would be hard to place a picture where you wanted to place it, and you couldn't size an image to the exact size you wanted it you had to chose from small, medium, large, x-large and original which would be a pain.
The good thing is that all the work is there in one place.