Friday 4 April 2014

Question 4

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

Throughout the course we have used various technologies all interlinking with the construction of media products, these ranging from iMovie to Prezi and have constructed all of our products using the newly developed iMacs that we wouldn't ordinarily use in our day to day lives. 

We'd used Microsoft Word and PowerPoint in order to construct our research and planning together, I believe we'd used these due to the familiarity of them. Becka and I are both aware of each programme and I believe constructing our ideas and planning on these allowed us to broaden our knowledge on research because it was a tool that we knew would work and be able to be appropriately saved. Becka had created some research mind maps using PowerPoint because she was easily able to incorporate various shapes and arrows that she needed to effectively create a mind map. 
Word allowed us to construct and appropriate questionnaire that we needed to give us an insight of what the viewers really wanted within a thriller film, this was beneficial as it allowed us to then print off multiple questionnaires we'd designed. Word also allowed us to write down everything such as; ideas, analysis and evaluation of other products that we needed so then we could then post it to our blogs later on. Using this product meant that we weren't just simply talking about our ideas; we would be writing them down so that we could apply them later without forgetting vital parts of discussion. 
We had also used PowerPoint to adapt our billing block to have a more professional appearance, using Photoshop claimed to difficult as the text wouldn't move or change as we'd have liked however using PowerPoint and simply copying and pasting items we were able to make the professionalism of our billing block greater. 
To conclude I'd suggest Word and PowerPoint to be a beneficial programme that instantly allowed us to construct greater ideas and products, however we wouldn't use this software to develop our images for our products because unlike Photoshop it lacks professional quality and limits what you can do to the chosen product. 
Photography studio
We'd used the photography studio to capture our images for our ancillary tasks, we wanted our images to look as professional as possible and felt that using this setting as opposed to a natural setting would benefit our film greater. 
Paired with a studio setting is artificial lighting and we took full advantage of the quality equipment. We shot our images in the dark room and simply used the artificial lighting, we wanted to give the impression that the female was held hostage within a dark room even though the one in the trailer featured no element of pitch black. The pitch black eliminated the busy dark room background and meant that our products would have a plain background that wouldn't need to be extremely tampered with. To conclude I'm very glad we used the studio to capture our images because it meant the images looked very professional as we'd also used a professional camera that we had private access to. 

Internet 
We relied on the internet a lot when constructing, researching and planning our media products because we'd used the following: Facebook for feedback, Google for images of movie posters and magazine covers, YouTube for trailers and clips and traileraddict.com for all of the trailer previews.
I believe the internet is a useful way to retrieve all the information you need to research a product because it accesses everything you could ever want to know about. I believe it's improved our product because we were able to access existing media products so that we could compare and contrast the similarities and what we could improve so that our product had the same potential as the real life magazines, posters and trailers. 

We used Photoshop to develop our images for our ancillary products, we felt that Photoshop had helped us achieve the all important look that a thriller genre consists of. Using this software we were able to create 'low-key' lighting which thriller genres promote. 
The advantage of Photoshop is that it is a software that professionals use to create media products, as we have used it we are one step ahead of those who are unaware of how to use a programme, the software allowed us to professionally enhance our film poster and magazine cover. 

iMovie was the most vital programme we'd used to construct our media product, the trailer was priority and even though people say iMovie is 'too simplistic' it offered us the tools we needed to construct the most effective trailer. iMovie gave us the greatest options and I already had background knowledge of the programme which meant I didn't have to waste additional time learning how to effectively work a new software. I'd became quite a 'pro' when using the programme as I had background knowledge and I was developing this knowledge experimenting with tools that I hadn't before. 
The benefit of using iMovie was that it had a wide variety of effects and transition options which would be suitable for any genre that was being created, especially thriller as the 'dissolve' transition was at our fingertips. The effects were also at reach whenever we needed them, these were effective as they created the past and present look that was needed in our trailer. The layout of the programme was also simpler than more advanced software: Final Cut Express which I felt limited our options and knowledge as I was unable to effectively work the programme without messing our scenes up. 
To conclude I'd highly recommend this programme when constructing a media film or trailer because it has many options and tools that are easily accessible without confusion. 



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