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

 Technology has now enabled millions of people globally to be able to upload images, videos, music files and more. This means the enhancement of technology now allows those who were consumers of media to become producers of media. As the internet is rapidly becoming more advanced, more unknown people are able to access their products and views across the world and reach a vast audience. This is known as web 2.0.

For example, YouTube enabled me to upload my teaser trailer rough drafts in order to post them on to the Blogspot site where it can be accessed by anyone who is on the net. I used Blogspot throughout both years 12 and 13. It helped me to record my planning and research which made it a lot easier to review the development progressions of my final finished products. Instead of just having a blog consisting of heavy text, it encouraged me to embed videos from YouTube (which was very helpful when I wanted to post my uploaded and updated work on the site to my blog.) Being able to do this made my blog look more appealing which encourages viewers on the net want to look at it.

The screen shot on the right shows that in order to embed a video on to the blog you just simply copy the embed code (highlighted in blue) and paste it on to a post and then click compose. You are then able to view your video at the click of a button. I found this extremely helpful although sometimes it could take a while to upload your video to YouTube.

Before I began to produce my products I had to use the internet to research existing media products in order to alleviate my knowledge of the conventions if the products to make mine look authentic. I analysed successful teaser trailers, film posters and film magazine front covers, in order to put these conventions in to visual contexts. I then posted some of these analyses on Blogger so that I could go back to them whenever I wanted to remind myself of the construction of these products. In my research I viewed a large quantity of teaser trailers from the popular site ‘YouTube’ as this was the easiest place to preview trailers. I also used search engines such as Google to help me find film posters and film magazine front covers to analyse. By analysing these real media products, this aided me to think about storyboarding. I observed closely at the rough amount of shots that made up a teaser trailer and the construction as a whole. I then produced a storyboard to give me a rough idea of how I wanted to my trailer to appear and a shot list which I uploaded to my blog so that I could see the order of my teaser trailer.

During the production stages I first used a Sony handy cam DCR-SR35 video camera (shown below, right), although my shots came out quite fuzzy and grainy. So when I did a re-shoot using my Fujifilm digital SLR camera, the results were a lot better. Although if my production had a larger budget I would have advised to use a more advanced video camera as the settings on my digital SLR are more suitable to taking images. On the plus side, this camera did also let me take advantage of being able to take some images to show the costumes, make up and location. The amazing element of the digital SLR is that we can now copy them over to computers and edit images to improve them, change sizes and rotate and also obtain and print out many images at a lower cost in comparison with the old fashioned film cameras. This also means we can access them immediately instead of waiting for them to be developed which saves a lot of time.

After collecting all my footage I wanted to convert the clips from ‘AVI’ files to ‘MOV’ files in order to use them in Final Cut Express without having to constantly render after each changes were made. I then imported the footage and illuminated the ‘unusable’ clips which were not to the highest quality and positioned them on the time line in the order I wanted to produce a quick rough copy. This was the first time I have ever used Final Cut Express so also did some research on YouTube to find some tutorials of how to do the basics and create some special effects. I also wanted to include some sound effects in my teaser so I used a software name ‘Soundtrack Pro’ which again I had also never used before, so I also looked on YouTube for some tutorials which helped me to expand my skills and improve my final piece. I also found it difficult to upload just a voice over for one of my evaluation questions. Which you see in the tutorial below one of the videos I viewed to help me embed an audio file from ‘DivShare’

 For the magazine cover I used photoshop to edit the image. To have the girls heads partially covering the Empire masthead i had to use the magnetic tool to cut out the girls bodies from the background and create a separate layer to place the masthead sandwiched between the background and the image. This was sometimes difficult as I had to then line it back up with the original image. I also spent a long time on editing the actual photo. I wanted the ghost girls faces to be whiter and their eyes to be darker so I used the cloning tool to do this. I then used separate layers to apply the conventions over the top just in case there were ones I eventually wanted to erase.

Over all, without access to the internet I believe that this task would have extremely challenging even though in stages I thought it was difficult enough to produce magazines, film posters and a trailer ensuring that they follow the conventions of real media texts. For example, I found the editing processes extremely frustrating at times as it was very time consuming. However I am very happy with my final results as I believe the variety of shots, use of filters and transitions and definitely sound effects and soundtrack over the top just lifts the product to feel like a professional film trailer. Even though it takes a lot of time to find out how to convert files in order to upload them to sites such as ‘YouTube’ and post them on the Blogspot, I find it so much easier to upload to a blog instead of printing pages out and putting it in to a folder. This just shows how much technology has evolved and is continuing to develop.