How did you use media technologies in the construction and

research, planning and evaluation stages?

In Research and planning….

In the construction, we used several sites like IMDB, YouTube, face book, In face book we made an online group where we posted and shared useful links that can aid us in our pre and post productions.

Collective discussions were held by commenting over a single post and we were able to stay in touch even after our school hours.

In IMDB we were able to find out the movies related to our genres as they are well tabulated and listed there. In YouTube we were able to analyze the trailers to study the codes and conventions of making a trailer similar to our genre

Using Google search engine and IMDB we were able to find more information on the films and the directors.

The first half of our research was done on YouTube and second on Google. After we had finalized what we wanted to make, the next step was to see how well received our idea was by the audience. For that we conducted several surveys and research on our target audience by knowing their issues and problems and how they can relate themselves with the movie. After distributing the questionnaire and studying the responses, they were tabulated using Microsoft excel and uploaded on our blog.

• Focus Group

• Rushes

• First Cut

• Second Cut

• Final Cut

Use of YouTube

Construction and ResearchConstruction and Research

•Facebook pageFacebook page of the group.of the group.•Bloging at Bloging at

www.blogspot.com

•For research, For research, Google was the Google was the best search engine best search engine that we used. that we used. •References from References from Pete’s Media Pete’s Media blog were taken.blog were taken.

§WikipediaWikipedia, YouTube, , YouTube, ImdbImdb

and rotten tomatoes, and rotten tomatoes,

were the sites used to see were the sites used to see

thethe ratings ratings, trailers, , trailers,

postersposters, directors, , directors, actorsactors and and

producers of the films we producers of the films we

researched on.researched on.

• Scanners and printers

• Camera

• Tripod

• Cell phone

• iPods

• Laptop

• Internet

• USB, portable hard drives.

Use of hardware

Facebook page discussions.

Tweeted on twitterFor audience

feedback

Surveys on Facebook and survey monkey.

Time Management(schedules on

Microsoft Word)

YouTube for analysis of trailers,

uploading the videos we

Made.

Construction

Personalized the blog

(photoshop)

In Production…

Use of Photoshop• We used Photoshop to make the ancillaries. The tools

we used were magnetic lasso tool to isolate the images from their respective background.

• We used color balance and brightness/contrast effects from the view tab to manipulate the colors and make them blend with everything else. We used these effects for the color correction as well.

• Problems we faced: • Complicated• After rasterizing layers we cannot edit the image in

chunks

The reason why we changed the form of the title was because as it can be seen that previous theme of the title did not match with the theme of the whole magazine. We showed our actors in a more friendly interactive way as the magazine review talked about their personal life more than their role in the film. Therefore we had to keep a green font that would contrast with black background and stand out in the magazine hence making the cover more stylish.

Before

After

Use of Premier for the video editing• We used premiere for editing and adding effects in our

movie. We first started with the simple razor tool to align the shots in sequence. We added effects using levels, gradient effect and color balance too in the effects tab in the sidebar.

Advantage of using premiere: • If used on a PC with a bigger RAM space, editing and

previewing can be real time• Auto-saved data in case the premiere crashes• We had a last year experience of using premiere

hence we were able to use the software effectively• This software is used worldwide so we had many

tutorials on YouTube.

Problems we faced:•Rendering was time consuming •Different formats of video files were not supported in other computers•Premiere file were not opening into another computer unless the work was saved on USB. •The version of premiere we used did not support some video formats hence we had to convert them and in the process the quality got distorted.

Xilisoft Video Converter

This was the converter used for converting video files. We used H126 Mpeg 4.avi format to convert all the raw footage. The final format was in Mpeg2. For uploading on YouTube we used MOV or Mpeg1 format.

Making a logo of our production house: • We named our production house shut up productions and we used

preset animation of text when shut up production appeared on screen along with manually changing the transformation, adding the dissolve and fade in effect etc.

• We edited some portion of our film into after effects as well. An Advantage of using adobe project files is that it is transferrable to different adobe applications. For example adobe premiere project file can be opened in after effects

• In captions we used the preset blue flashlight animation and the courier new font. For the coming soon we used the preset exposure text animation in the after effects

Use of after effects for animation of our logo and captions

Audacity

We used Audacity for voice over. We got royalty free music from www.incompetech.com. Sound mixing and editing was done using premiere where we used Denoiser form audio effects to normalize music and reduce background noise. Also in places the volume of the music had to be inconsistent. For that we used audio gain in speed duration tab

Picnik:

We used the fonts from Picnik for our magazine cover. We found different variety of fonts for our magazine cover

Problems:Slow rendering The export file is usually bad in qualityLess format choices for the export file,

Comparison with AS Level:

•The main difference between AS and A2 is that we only did relevant research unlike AS. •We used Twitter for updating our followers.•And the most advancement that we made was in our evaluation process. In AS we only used one technology in our evaluation questions that was blogging. •This year we have only done one question in a written form. We used prezi.com for one question. Prezi is a website that we used to make presentations in a more fancy way. It basically lets you jumble up your work in one place and it zooms in the chronological order we want to present our work in.

• For this particular question we used PowerPoint and in our audience feedback question we used videography. For which we have been video taping since the beginning of A2.

•So in terms of research and technology we were very clear and persistence and very specific.