Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,

planning and evaluation questions?

Research and Planning stageIn our research, we needed to look into other crime films, audience research and trailer analysis. To do this, we used a number of websites. We mainly used YouTube, as it featured all of the trailers that we wanted to watch, allowing us to pause it at parts to be able to analysis small details. YouTube is also great as it allows you to look at films similar to ones that we were watching, which broadened our knowledge of the crime genre, opening us up to watching film trailers that we may have not considered watching before e.g. Scarface and The Italian Job. Also, IMBD (international movie database) is a really good website we used to look at film descriptions and synopsis’. We also looked at BBFC to gain all the right information we needed to make sure we aimed our film at the right audiences.

Using ‘quack.varndean.ac.uk’ enabled us as a group to review each others progress. If we don’t receive a response from someone if there are busy, we can visit each others blogs to see how everyone adapts each post. It also meant that we could refer back to the work that we did in AS and see what details we may have forgotten. This worked as a good way to refresh our memories in an independent way. Our group also used Google Drive so that we could share files between all three of us. This proved a lot easier as we could still access it ourselves, without the worry that we may delete an email. It also allowed a notification to be made every time we shared something with the group and it became a much more convenient way of sharing our files.

We had help from our college as we have access to our ‘moodle’ site which hold different templates for examples such as storyboards and other templates which help us to create as better blog posts as possible. This was incredibly useful to give us a base as where to start with our planning processes. It also featured examples of previous students work. This allowed us to adapt their ideas into our own on factors that we may have been slightly stuck on. It worked really well as we could see how other students interpreted the ideas and allowed us to extend our thoughts.

When looking into what sounds we wanted to use for our trailer, we had to research into the copyrighting laws of what we could use. So when we found bensound.com we were relieved that we could use a soundtrack that we were happy with, which had a professional finish. The owner of the website displayed on the site that it was okay to use the soundtrack as long as we mentioned him in the trailer. As we would not have had a large budget to scale our film, we obviously needed to look into finding music that was royalty free and this is what the internet allowed us to do.

Production stageIn order to film the footage for our trailer in a professional and well-done manner, we used Erika’s Canon 600d camera. It also meant that we could take photos if needed, whilst filming, instead of having to carry around extra equipment throughout the filming process. This made it easier for us to use the correct aperture, ISO settings and lighting techniques. We decided not to use additional lighting as we wanted to edit that into the sequencing when editing our footage back at college. We also didn’t use an external microphone as it wasn’t needed; we were recording al of our sounds separately back at college for the voice over. In addition to creating a professional finish, we used Adobe Premier Pro to edit all of the footage together with adding effects that aren’t available on other software's. We had some experience with this software from the precious year of editing, however, we did need some help from the teachers in order to get every single editing technique that we wanted to add into our trailer and make it look as perfect as possible.

EvaluationTo make sure our blogs looked as good as possible, we wanted to use different mediums of posts, these included; Prezi, Slideshare, PowerPoint and YouTube and we did this by embedding the links into each post. By using these ways of presentation, it made it easier and more interactive to display each post to our audiences. It also added a clear and coherent flow to all of our posts as we wanted them to flow smoothly throughout and be clear to read for the audience. Slideshare and Prezi are presentations that you create to upload onto your own page. This means that they are all together in one place, which also means that as a group we view each others presentations and give feedback before we finally post them onto our blogs.

We also used YouTube to post our final trailer. This was the best website to post it is known worldwide and also creates a communication circle for all of the viewers. There is also constant access for anybody to see how many views we received, as well as comments, likes and shares that we received.