Friday, 4 April 2014

Evaluation 4

How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?


 When we started to create our products and presenting them we used many different technologies these ranged from applications used on sites as well as software's on the macs which include Blogger and GarageBand.  New media technologies have been used from the very beginning from planning and research right the way through to the evaluation.  These range from Apple's Mac to Adobe softwares, Mac's were our main source to other programs simply because of their design, they are created for creative use meaning we could be more experimental with our products, as well as giving them a different perspective as we aimed to challenge the conventions of a war film.


     Microsoft office consists of programs such as PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Publisher etc.  These are all programs people use in their everyday lives including for their leisure as well as business use for their occupations and we decided to use them in many different stages of our projects due to the ease of use and familiarity of the programs within the software. For example I used them for when i was researching my target audience and so
 I used Word to create my target audience questionnaires,  this then gave them a professional look and kept the layout neat. For my results of the questionnaires I used a combination of PowerPoint and Excel to create a range of graphs to show the responses to my questionnaire results By using PowerPoint this then allowed me to use it to be able to present for the charts and Excel allowed me to easily input the data and create the graphs in which I needed.  This was helpful when extracting the useful data for future decisions. 
     Using Microsoft Office and its applications as a group gave us a huge advantage as within the group we have two members who study ICT - One being my self,  and all of us have some experience with the programs, it meant we could use the software easily and didn't feel limited by the lack of knowledge. 


     Once we began to create our trailer we decided as a group we would use Final Cut Express  to put everything together as the program was more professional and allowed us to have more of a creative perspective over what we do to the footage.  Such as cutting footage, deleting audio, adding extra audio, combine visual and audio elements, apply filters, change the size of footage etc.
     A reason for us choosing Final Cut Express over iMovie is because of the higher professional level the program is on. This is because Final Cut Express is used widely in the media industry and is particularly popular with people who do video blogs also known as vloggers and many other professionals in the business.  If professionals use Final Cut Express then we are more likely to make a higher standard film with the same effect as them.
     Final Cut Express had more pros to offer us than cons, however we came into contact with a few issues when using the program.  An example is that the camera's that we were using we had to import footage through iMovie and then export it to XML.  This was time consuming and downgraded the quality of some of the footage, it also meant we had to teach ourselves how to convert it again.  Although once you get used to the program it is fairly easy to use, teaching yourself is rather difficult as you have to search very specific things and sometimes can't find sufficient tutorials.



           
     GarageBand was an extremely useful software in which we used to create and compose the soundtrack for our film trailer.  By using GarageBand this then allowed use to use a wide variety of sounds, from Apple loops to downloaded MP3's from the internet, adjust the pitch, tone, tempo etc to create a smooth track that suited our kind of film.  The software allowed us to time the music perfectly, shorten or lengthen loops and make the sounds match up to certain parts of the trailer for dramatic effect.



Both  of our ancillary tasks ;our poster and magazine cover were made in Photoshop from start to finish, it allowed us to correct multiple things such as;
    lighting, adjust colors, crop and re-size, clone, add layers, add effects, text extra photos etc.  
All of Photoshop's tools were extremely useful, we could zoom in and change even the slightest of details, we cloned areas of the tree to cover the sky, added a vignetting effect around the edge, removed blemishes, warped certain images to change the shape, erase other parts and more. 
   



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