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

evaluation stages?

Media technologies have been so important throughout the process of our coursework in many ways whether they’re being used to make everything easier or even to make our work look professional. To begin with, we started off just making mind maps to plan ideas of what we could use as a topic and after that, story boards of how we wanted to plan our documentary. These however didn’t use media technologies because they were just written on paper. However the internet was briefly used to get ideas and facts and this goes on to the research stage of the process.

When researching our chosen topic of underage binge drinking, we knew it was important to use reliable information which is why we wanted to use mediums such a BBC and from newspapers such as the guardian so our information was up to date. This was all using internet providers such as safari and internet explorer.

Because we needed to do as much research into types of documentaries and also find statistics we needed to watch as many documentaries as we could. To do this we used play back materials such as 4OD, Iplayer, Youtube and DVDs.

Because we had done a lot of research and planning, this meant we were able to get on quickly with our filming as we knew what we wanted to include and how we wanted I to turn out. For the filming we used a cannon video camera which made it easy to focus and zoom in and out. We also used headphones and a long directional microphone so we could get the best sound quality we could. To make our videos be a still as possible so they look professional we used a tripod of lots of the filming as we felt using a handheld camera would make it look more like a film and not look like its trying to inform the audience.

When it came to the editing part of the process, we knew media technologies would be an important part. We used IMac computers and learnt a lot about how to use them. To edit our documentaries we used a program called Final Cut Pro as it would able our work to look professional. Once finishing filming, we were easily able to upload our videos by logging and transferring them onto the program. We were then able to chose which ones we wanted to use. To make it easier for ourselves, we labeled the videos with what they included so we knew which one to chose without having to watch them all.

Naming the clips

Once we knew our way around final cut, it was easy to get started with the editing of our documentary.

Our Clips

To view the clips

Screen to watch the work

Length of the clipSound and sound levels

ToolsTiming

We learnt many things when editing to create a professional product. These are some of the tools and effects we learnt how to use to make the documentary look as good as it could.

Cutting Tool. Because we obviously didn’t need all of the clips and everything we filmed we quickly found the cut tool which abled us to gather just the footage we needed.

For our montage, we decided that because there were lots of faces moving but only one talking, the others should be turned black and white. This image shows us going into effects and desaturating.

Just like in real documentaries, we decided that we needed our interviewees name and job title in the lower left hand corner of the screen and we did this by adding text. We were able to edit the font, size and colour so it was easy to see

It was important to us that we got the same sound levels throughout the documentary so our audience wasn’t left having to turn the volume up and down. This was easy to do as we just had to turn them up or down when applicable.

The editing and transitions is big when it comes to documentaries. However we didn’t want to spend time using different transitions on each clip we instead used a pen tool to fade them out as you can see on the picture. This worked well throughout the documentary as it was quite subtle

This is quite common in a documentary to have a blurred background with text over the top which is why we decided to do it. We went into edit and chose the best blur and added text. This definitely made our statistic stand out.

We used a program on the Macs to create our radio trail on Garage Band.

We first chose the best clips from our documentary that will best promote our documentary. This is what this picture show. The clips are on the timeline.

The clips we found would work best were some from the expert interviews and also some opinions from the students. They convey the message we are trying to put out to our audience.

It took us a long time to chose a correct piece of music throughout the radio trail as it is a very important part because the radio trail is so short it quickly needs to grab the audience. As we were focusing on students and parents and its about underage drinking I feel that the music fits in very well. It is a fast base paced song and something maybe students listen today in our society.

The media technology we used for our article was indesign. Because we used this last year in our AS year we pretty much knew our way around after a bit. We easily remembered how to add text, images and colour to our article to create the primary purpose of engaging our audience. We didn’t really use anything too hard as we wanted it to be as simple and basic as possible. In the article, I particularly like how we have edited the page numbers into cocktail drinks to fit into the drinking topic and also the ‘I’ in binge has been replaced with a vodka bottle. In conclusion the article wasn’t payed as much attention to as the radio trail and the documentary and I think this is shown throughout the article.