Evaluation Question Four

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

 When thinking about the different ways in which I could present my work, I considered many different blog sites that I could perhaps use. As a class we were advised to use Edublogs, but having used Blogger the previous year for my AS project, I was already familiar with how it worked in terms of customisation and embedding codes, etc. I decided to use Blogger once again for these reasons. Through the use of Blogger I was able to give my blog a certain aspect of personality and make it aesthetically pleasing to look at through the development of my project. Blogger additionally allowed for me to organise tags so I could link posts with the different stages of my development and place them into tabs for research, planning, production, etc. This makes my posts much easier to navigate through and much more structured. Throughout my entire project I used multiple ways to present and display my work and I was always looking for new presentation sites to use and different ways for creatively showcase my work.

During the research and planning stage of my project, I focused on visuals and creative ways to display paragraphs of writing and make it less heavy to read. I used various different websites, including emaze, Google Slides, animoto, Prezi, slideshare, livebooklet, PowToon, visme, bubbl.us and Scribd. I also created different iconography boards and together all of these sites enabled me to show and display my work creatively and in a variety of different ways. When presenting presentations, I also used Microsoft PowerPoint but as I was creating so many presentations, I didn’t want to be restricted to just PowerPoint so I therefore used sites such as Google Slides, Prezi, visme and emaze which allowed me to create more personalised and interactive presentations. Sites such as animoto and PowToon enabled me to create short videos that I could add music, photos and text to so I could give visuals across my blog in what my film will look like, etc. Bubbl.us was a site that allowed me to create mind maps and spider diagrams easily and I presented my various ideas for a plot on this site. Overall, I feel as though because of the use of multiple sites on my blog made my research and planning stage effective and presented creatively.

The production progress of my project I created my two ancillary products, discussed and considered props, actors and costumes, additionally this is where I began the filming process of my trailer. When discussing what actors, props and costumes I would use, I displayed in similar ways to how I did my research and planning (using sites such as Google Slides and emaze). When creating both of my ancillary products, I created them on Adobe Photoshop CS4 which is a professional software that many advertisers use to create posters, magazines, etc. I also used this software in my AS project to create a magazine front cover and I believed it to be successful and professional looking. I felt that if I wished to create a professional looking poster and magazine front cover, I had to use this software to do so. In regards to filming my trailer, I used an iPhone 6 to film on; at first I was cautious of using this device as I thought that the quality wouldn’t be high but I found quite the opposite and made the iPhone 6 my main device to film on. I also decided to use a ‘selfie stick’ in order to film scenes clearly and not hand held.

Once my film trailer was finally finished, it was time to edit it. I firstly researched into the different video editing software I could use: Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, Adobe After Effects and Sony Vegas. These are all video editing softwares that were accessible to me and will all allow for me to create a professional looking trailers with colouring effects and transitions. I decided to download the 30 day trail for Sony Vegas Pro 10 and used that for editing my trailer. I found this editing software easy to use in the sense of cutting scenes, adding overlays and creating transitions.

Overall, in regards to media technologies I made sure I was not limited to only a few presentation sites and I constantly kept up to date with new websites I found. I used media technologies to my advantage and made sure that I used multiple different presentation sites to present my work, also using software that is up to date with competition film companies since I decided on using professional software. Through media technologies, I have been able to give a creative and personalised spin on my project and been able to display it in multiple interactive ways.

(795 words)