By Steven Knowles

QUESTION 4

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION, RESEARCH, PLANNING AND

EVALUATION STAGES?

RESEARCH AND PLANNING• Throughout the research and planning stage, media technologies proved to be invaluable

in all aspects of our documentary. The main source of our information came on the internet through a variety of sources. The search engines Google and Ask helped us get to the topics we wanted to look at. For example, we used websites like BBC News, The Guardian and YouTube to find useful clips and facts on Social Networking.

• The Guardian and BBC News were our most trusted websites as they are world renowned to being truthful, factual and informative. We also saw facts about the social networking sites on these websites and it allowed us to use some of these in our documentary to keep the audience engrossed in the documentary.

• At home I use Google Chrome but at college, they have internet explorer. The internet was the most important research as we found most of our information from it.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING CONTINUED• The internet also allowed us to find facts on when we were looking into what channels we

wanted to have our documentary shown on. We analysed the facts of the channels, for example, do they have a documentary like ours on their channel? Do they show factual programmes? Do they have a lot of experience in the documentary business?

• All of these questions were important when it came down to our choice, but we decided to go for channel 4. The reason for this was because of their renowned reputation of showing documentaries on their channel. Due to this, we thought that it would increase the amount of views we get.

• The channels we looked at include Channel 4, BBC Three and ITV 2 because we thought these would all be suitable to screen our documentary. However, as stated above, after the research we found that Channel 4 was the best out of the three for our production.

RESEARCH AND PLANNING CONTINUED• The office software, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint were pivotal to our blogger as most of

our work was created and published on these. Our initial research questionnaire about what our documentary should include was written on Microsoft Word. The questionnaire allowed us to get feedback on our ideas and create an ideal documentary that was of sufficient quality.

• To keep our research together and in order, we used the internet site blogger to upload our work and keep it safe. To upload to this site, we had to use software technologies like Scribd, SlideShare and Prezi.

• To get a better idea of what a social networking documentary should entail and what conventions we should include and follow, we searched on YouTube, BBC iPlayer and some DVD’s for some opening extracts of documentaries that have already been aired to the public. The first documentary we looked at and analysed was Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Super-Size Me’ which is a documentary on the effects fast food has on the human body if excess amounts are consumed. The ability to use YouTube allowed us to access pretty much any documentary and also have a look at the opening ten minutes of the documentaries.

CONSTRUCTION - FILMING

• After we had completed the research and planning and knew exactly how we wanted our documentary to be, we started to film the actual documentary. Using all of the information we acquired during the research and planning, we created a documentary that we feel is appropriate content for our target audience. The information we gathered includes, a storyboard, pieces of information that we put in to keep our audience engrossed and a plan for filming to ensure we didn’t fall behind in the recording.

• The equipment we used in the documentary was sufficient to record a documentary to a good standard. The camera we used was a HD Canon which had all of the features necessary to film our production. For example, the camera had a zoom in, zoom out function and manual focus ring which allowed us to make the documentary more aesthetically appealing. We recorded a range of footage that we thought we might use in the documentary like vox pops, interviews, pans, pictures and achieve footage. When we were recording interviews, both interviews and vox pops, we used a tripod. This helped the interviews and vox pops look professional as the camera was still and allowed us to have smooth pan shots and zooms. For the interviews and vox pops we also used a microphone that we had to make sure was always out of shot. To make sure the sound was good while we recorded, one of us had some headphones on to listen. To avoid any errors, we tested everything and made sure that only the details we wanted were in the shot.

CONSTRUCTION – VOICEOVER

• To record the voice over we used a voice recorder and then uploaded the files onto the mac’s. Then we edited the audio to make sure it was correct and then placed them in the right places on the timeline in Final Cut Express.

CONSTRUCTION - EDITING

• After we had got our filming footage, the first thing we did was to log and transfer the clips over onto the Final Cut Express. Before we transferred them, we made sure we only did it to the clips that were of a high enough standard to go in the documentary. A fair bit of the footage we recorded was removed at this stage.

• The next thing to do was to transfer the clips onto our project but before we did this we renamed all of the clips so that we knew what was on them just from the description. This made it easier for us to simply drag and drop them in order.

• When we edited the clips, we used some transitions like cross dissolve to make the documentary more aesthetically appealing. To keep the professionalism as well, we also used a lot of straight cuts.

• On the audio, we sometimes used fade in’s and fade out’s to avoid a sudden burst of audio or sudden end to it. This made the sound flow a lot better.

• Also on the documentary we used text screens to put facts on the screen as well as using them for titles and headers. Overlays were also used to show the audience the names of the experts we interviewed.

CONSTRUCTION – UPLOAD & MUSIC• When we had completed the video and altered the sound levels so it was a consistent

volume throughout, we had to export the video to YouTube. It has to be exported to YouTube in order to get the embed code which we can use to display the video on our blog.

• The music we used for our documentary came off the website www.vimeo.com and was in the copyright free music section.

• The finished sound timeline looks like this:

• The finished video timeline looks like this:

CONSTRUCTION – RADIO TRAILER

• For the creation of our radio trailer we used clips from our documentary, parts of the voiceover from the documentary, the music from the documentary and some extra news clips that we recorded and didn’t use in the documentary.

• The sound levels of the radio trailer had to be correct and we made sure that they were to make it as best as possible. There was also a fade out at the end which made it finish well.

CONSTRUCTION - DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD

• In preparation for the construction of the double page spread, we first took print screens of our documentary for our double page spread images. After we took them, we edited them in Photoshop before exporting them to InDesign.

• For the double page spread, we had two smaller images and the main image. All of them were stills of the documentary so it meant the double page spread has a direct link to the documentary making them recognisable together.

• Having looked at examples from various magazines, we drew up a sketch of what the magazine will look like. This allowed us to go straight onto the computer with all the resources we need and then simply put them together on InDesign.

• Below to the left is a magazine that we looked at for ideas whilst the one on the right is our double page spread that we created.

EVALUATION

• For the evaluation, I used Microsoft Word for question 1 which was uploaded onto the blog by using Scribd, Prezi for questions 2 and 3 which comes with an embed code, then finally using Microsoft Powerpoint for question 4 which I uploaded from Slideshare.

• Prezi was a very good software to use for my evaluation questions which is an interactive presentation software that was easy to use and allowed me to add images and while using attractive graphics to go from one part of the evaluation to the other.