How did you use media technologies in the

construction and research, planning and evaluation

stages?

Research and Planning• The blog could be used in this stage to display the research carried out easily, as it makes it far

easier to analyse existing products and trailers and access them straight away at a later date from home or school.

• This meant work could be carried out in either place allowing more research to be done. • The facility to be able to embed videos and upload images helped visually as it allows the reader

to see what it is you are analysing without having to find out for themselves.• The category feature allows easier access to the research stages, separating it from the

construction and evaluation work to make it more clear.• However, Wordpress had many flaws which will be discussed later.• The progress of my trailer and other products in general could be clearly published to show the

changes in development stages as time went on. Youtube helped to accomplish this but Wordpress was useful as it had the facility to embed my own videos.

The Internet• The internet allowed me to research trailers and their conventions very effectively. • With Youtube broadcasting thousands of videos, trailers were very easy to find and finding ones in

my genre of action is easy anyway as many films exist in that genre, meaning that I only have to type the title in and get results.

• I chose Bourne for example as a film I liked and therefore used the trailer to influence my own work. This can be seen as a chase sequence also appears in my trailer, as a result of having seen how captivating and effective they could be in an action trailer.

• The internet therefore has influenced my work by allowing me to access existing and successful material so that I can change my own work to match the conventions of existing trailers, increasing the chances of creating a successful and more importantly a more interesting trailer.

• If we had not been able to use the internet, research would have been much harder as the only access to trailers that we would have would be previous year’s work and physically going to the cinema purely to see trailers at the start in order to base ours upon, which would have been problematic as you never know which ones will be shown in each film.

• I did go to the cinema to see if any new trailers grabbed my attention that I could later go back to Youtube to analyse. I found nothing so instead scanned the DVD shelf and came across the Bourne films, and decided to look up the trailers for them.

• Overall the internet was extremely helpful, as if we had not been able to use it, research would have taken much longer and may not have been as in depth. Research would still have taken place with other media being available such as the cinema.

The Use of Social Networking• I did use social networking sites such as Facebook to carry out further research as

well as improvements for the development element of the course.• They allowed friends to see the work I had done and suggest things that they felt

would improve my work, as of course they are the target audience and will know what it is they want to see in the cinema and have a good idea of what attracts them to a film.

• Many commented on my work and I have pictures of a few in previous pots where people comment that they would actually want to go and see the film based on one part of my work e.g. poster

Development of Skills• Having previously made a draft video to get to grips with the software we would be using

(Premiere elements 2.0), I felt confident in starting to edit my trailer as I knew how to add transitions and order the shots effectively.

• I did have some issues with a camera at the beginning of filming, but having learnt more about them, I soon realised it was to do with the way in which the card was formatted and so I changed this and got around the problem.

• Any issues I had with the editing software could be resolved by finding tutorials on Youtube that show you how to do certain things using the software. This was helpful as often I wanted to do something others might not know how to do, such as exporting the file in widescreen, a problem that meant all videos were squashed to 4:3 on Youtube. I found out the format had to be changed in advanced settings and so managed to get the software to create a file in 16:9 format.

Skills I Needed

• It was important to have a basic understanding of the software but to make a successful trailer, I needed to be able to do many things at a high level.

• These included: basic editing, importing files both video and picture formats, creating soundtracks on audacity, exporting files, use of transitions between clips, manipulation of levels such as saturation and brightness to create the same amount of light in each clip without compromising quality and interpreting the footage to display in widescreen.

Premiere Elements 2.0• This was an essential piece of software in the construction stages as it allowed me to create and

edit my trailer quickly and easily.

• It had many advantages such as being easy to use and find tutorials for how to do things and being fairly reliable.

• It did not require any conversions of files and dealt with clips of a variety of formats and displayed in the same way each time, even with sound clips allowing a soundtrack to be dropped in straight away without editing being done to it.

• The many tracks it allows lets you put a soundtrack to the video clips and have dialogue or sound effects over the top as well, giving a multi layered effect and creating a sense that it is a professional piece of work, as one sound at a time would appear tacky and would no doubt sound cheap.

• However, it did crash occasionally causing me to lose work, but this could be overcome by saving work often to make sure that I did not lose any work that had been done.

• Also, there was a problem for a while where it would say that it exported in widescreen, when in fact it was not doing this and converted back to 4:3 by the time it had loaded onto Youtube. I overcame this by exploring the options around the export option to find if there was another format you could export through and it turned out MPEG exports remained in widescreen when on Youtube.

Photoshop• Photoshop was incredibly useful when creating my magazine and poster. It allowed me to impose

the binary onto the protagonist's face easily using a mask in a separate document, and then I was able to put this on the magazine cover I had already developed.

• In some stages of development it was no better than publisher e.g. when I had to add text to the background as publisher operates all on one layer whereas Photoshop creates many, leaving a problem trying to find the correct layer if you need to move an object.

• It was easy to export the images to the blog in high quality and the photos could be edited to a professional standard.

• The poster was easy to make, by altering the threshold of the original picture making it black and white and creating a pleasing effect. I then was able to drop in the film title and create some writing at the bottom to make it look more realistic. However, I do not feel that another programme would not have been able to accomplish this as effectively.

• I was also able to make a production company logo to go in my trailer on Photoshop. I did this by changing the colour levels and whereabouts on the page the lines went. I tried to make it fit in with my genre and I think this works as it seems to look similar to a circuit board adding a computer element to it.

• It was slow to render layers at points and took a while to save or load images. A lot of the time objects would not move or layers would disappear from the document creating a problem when trying to move certain objects on the page.

Publisher• I used publisher mainly in my evaluation stages using it to create documents where I could

analyse existing products against my own and compare and contrast the conventions of them.

• This worked well because publisher was easy to use and worked just as well as word but added a new technology to the project as a whole. It allowed me to point out the exact features of each product and explain what I liked about them, what worked well and what the audience would find attractive in each product.

• It was not particularly challenging to use which I found disappointing as I like to overcome technological problems but it was reliable and I did not have any problems with this programme.

Audacity• This was used to make my soundtrack for the trailer. I asked a friend if he would mind making me

a track to use as I had encountered a problem with using existing tracks on Youtube when my progress was blocked for containing music that was copyrighted. I searched for tracks without copyright restrictions but couldn’t find any I liked so I got a friend to make me my own.

• It was easy to edit the track on here, editing out any mistakes and normalising the sound levels of it as recordings tend to be fairly loud to begin with.

• However, when exporting it did take a long time and often it would be in a format that premiere elements did not understand, so I had to research which ones the video editing software would accept.

• I also tried to transfer the file from home to school, and when it failed realised that it saves many files all over the place for just one track and I had copied the project, so it could not find any files to make itself again. This was unnecessarily difficult and I would have preferred to have used a sound editing programme that kept all files in one place or just saved one file as a whole project.

PowerPoint• PowerPoint was also used mainly for my evaluation stages.

• I did briefly use it in my construction to create a profile for my protagonist, in which the lettering appeared one by one to create a high budget effect like you see in Bond films where criminals faces appear on computer screen with information about them.

• It was useful in that sense as I could easily apply animation sequences to the text to then film afterwards.

• The evaluation stages were based around PowerPoint also and by loading the files to slideshare I could embed them on my blog allowing people to see what I had done.

• Like publisher, this windows programme was reliable and did not really have any problems. It did not require me to do anything extra than I wanted to do and did not need to be exported in a specific format to be compatible with slideshare and Wordpress.

Youtube• This was crucial in all stages of the course as the research revolved mainly around trailers found

here. It was very easy to find them and rarely failed on me. A problem was hat the school filtering system did not allow me on certain trailers and also it did sometimes take a long time to load.

• During the construction stages this website allowed me to load my progress with the trailer and then embed them to the blog. This meant people could comment on it freely on either platform. It was quick to load the videos to Youtube and when searching for my trailer it generally came straight up instead of an unrelated video.

• However, there was a problem where it converted 16:9 videos into 4:3 leaving black lines around the outside of the videos online. This turned out to be a problem where only certain formats were accepted to Youtube and so I had to change the way I exported files from Premiere Elements to allow Youtube to display them in widescreen. This took a while to sort out but I feel it was worth it as the footage is no longer squashed and out of proportion.

• As a website it does have a tendency to freeze a lot presumably this is down to the computer more than the website however it does choose to only show the loading screen for a video fairly often which can be time consuming meaning that another video has to be found.

Soundcloud• Soundcloud was a way to display on the blog soundtracks and audio tracks.

• I used this for my soundtrack development and also in the valuation stages. It is useful and reliable playing the track in good quality without too much loading time as the track is instantly available.

• It is fairly quick to upload to the website considering what it is trying to do and it accepts a wide variety of formats which avoids any conversion delays in the upload speed..

• There is no limit to the length of the track and they do not get moderated and removed like on Youtube so if I added a music track which they thought was copyrighted it would not be removed unless exactly the same, which can be seen as sound waves appear in the display box.

Slideshare• This is a similar website to Soundcloud except it works on PowerPoints. Using this they can be

loaded to the website where they can then be embedded on the blog.

• It has the same disadvantages as all other websites in that it can be slow and unreliable. It also requires a specific embed code to put on the blog instead of the standard one. It also converts the font used to a standard one which can look a bit tacky if you have used an unusual but legible font.

• It is useful though as it allows PowerPoints to be loaded on to the blog and viewed as they would in the original document so in this sense it works. Once on the blog it is reliable and does not crash as much as Youtube videos do.