Lauren's evaluation (part four)

HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION, REASEARCH, PLANNING AND THE EVALUATION STAGES?

YOUTUBE

We found Youtube really useful whilst finding research and getting inspiration. It helped us get an idea of what different conventions look like, and whether they work. It has a wide variety of clips to watch so whatever I typed in the search bar I was able to find. The only negative thing about Youtube we found was that the clips sometimes took a long time to buffer before I could play them.

BLOGGER

We liked using Blogger as it is very easy and straight forward to use, You can customize your background to make it look more attractive to the viewer, you can upload images and videos and you can also receive feedback from your teacher on each post you publish. The downside we found to using Blogger is that once you’ve published your post it stays in that order so you cannot organize posts which you publish at a later date. Also we found that the images and videos could take up to 10-15minutes to upload and that the images sometimes place themselves differently when published to how we Arranged them in the post.

I think our coloured backdrop works well to attract the viewers as it is bright and colourful to grab attention. I feel we have organized our blog quite well, to the best we could and if we needed to make arrangements we have made this clear by change the font of ‘arrangements’ to red. This is an advantage of Blogger and this is how we overcame the problems of Blogger being hard to organize.

IMDB

We used this website mostly for finding research about films of a similar genre to ours. We found this website very easy to use and it is full of every detail of information about every film. For each film its has a list of information such as Director, Plot of Film, Cast, Filming Locations, Company and many more. The only negative about IMDB is that sometimes some of the pages are confusing as they have a lot of information on the pages.

DAFONT
This website was really helpful as it provides every font you can imagine which helped us be creative and make things look professional. It is very easy to use and you can even submit the word/phrase you want in a certain font then you can see what your word/phrase looks like. Its is also very easy to download the font and use it straight away. The thing I found hard was downloading the font as I wasn't very familiar with the website, but I got the hang of it in the end.

FINAL CUT EXPRESS

This software was very good and helped us achieve a good trailer. The software has so many options, effects, etc that you can use on your clips, for example we used the 'Matte Choker' effect which made the edges of images clearer on 'green screened' images. Its layout is good and well organised once you get used to it. The bad thing about the software is that the layout can get a little confusing as the viewer and browser look similar but do different things.

When Green Screening we had to upload the still image and place that in one timeline above the timeline which the footage was placed, then we edited the footage on top of the still image, by increase the softness of the background, leaving a bright blur around the actresses colour ,correcting and fading off the green colour left around the footage. The main problem we found when Green sreening was that there was red dots and black dots left showing after all the editing, this was because we didnt do the filming of the footage in a well lit area, and for perfect green screening you need well lit, studio light, and due to low money budgets we weren't able to create this lighting.

DV CAMERA AND TRIPOD

The camera we used was good and easy to use. You can rewind and watch things back and stop/play and pause whenever you need to. A negative of the camera is that sometimes it would'nt record properly and ws recording with fuzzt black lines through the footage, this was probably because the settings had been changed by accident. When creating our teaser trailer we used a DV Camera and also a tripod so that our shots smoother and not jurky, making them easy to watch. The cameras are small and compact this made the filming easy, and aslo helped use get a much more variety of angles. We had probems with some of our shots being poorly lit so some of the shots we did at night are quite hard to see, this led to the camera not being able to capture the footage clearly. We also used a Lumix digital stills camera to take photos for our poster and film magazine and also a city night scape. Our pictures came out well, but some of them are pixelated in out final products. On the city scape, this was due to the zoom not being very good on the camera.

ITUNES AND IMOVIE

We chose our music by listening to some CD’s using 'iTunes' which was very easy to use as it is well laid out and very simple. We eventuall found about 5 songs we wanted to use, so we listened to each one over and over, and came to the decision of using the one which was uptempo and sounded action-like. Then we had to upload the songs onto the computer, to the software 'iMovie' and then make a short video with a black screen and just the soundtrack playing. This made it alot easier to just upload it to our blog as a video.

The quality of diegetic sound on our footage didn't really matter as we did not use any diegetic sound in our teaser trailer, just the soundtrack.

PHOTOSHOP

Using this software was learning a new skill for me as i had never usd it before, but i soon learnt how to use it, and got some help off Rachael who had used Photoshop before. We used this software to edit our still images for our ancillary tasks. We cut round the 'Total Film' logo off the top of a picture of the magazine and then just left ourselfs with the picture of the logo, which we then used on our magazine. We cut round the image using the 'lasso tool'. On our film poster we wanted to create the whole image as a 'Sin city' effect; Black and white, and we wanted the lips of our actress on the poster to have red lips. We did this by making the whole image black and white, and using a de-saturation filter and then colour selecting red and coluring in the lips on the actress.

When we had done this, we had the image of the actress stood on top of a roof, but the image ad gone all pixelated and it was poor quality and really dark, so we decided to change the background image to a city night scape. We cut out the image of the actress and placed that on the city night scape. So in the end we had a Sin City effect on the image of the actress, a coloured background with orange street lights visable and red lips on the actress. We did the same sort of thing with our film magazine, we cut around the image of our actress and placed her on a white background to create a studio look.

INDESIGN

To piece our poster and magazine together we used the software 'InDesign' this helpd us create two very clear, realistic, professional products. I had no experience with InDesign before but i learnt how to do things very quick as it is fairly easy to use. The only downside i found with this software was that some of the pictures started looking pixelated and sometimes i found it hard to remember which button did what, as they are all icons, it doesnt tell you what does what.

Lauren