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

Compared to my foundation portfolio last year, during the creation of my sap trailer and ancillery texts, my use of technology and understanding of conventions has greatly improved. This time, I used more programmes and software, made use of web 2.0, used higher quality filming equipment and more advanced editing equipment. The image to the left is a photograph of myself in the process of filming one of our scenes, using a Sony HD camera to capture the footage. These cameras allowed us to record in 1080p, meaning the quailty and resolution of the footage was much higher than the Canon cameras we used to record last year, in essence making our soap trailer look much more professional and authentic. Not only is this because of it being HD and the higher number of megapixels, but also because the HD cameras used SD cards, allowing us to easily upload our footage to the memory stick without converting the the file. Last year, the canon had even more problems as the film was recorded onto tape, and so we couldn't rewind our footage for fear that we would overide our previous footage when we came to film again.

After the filming process, we used Apple Mac computers and imported our film into the programme Final Cut Pro 10. The image on the left is a screengrab from the programme. Familiarising ourselves with Final Cut was our first task, as up until now we had been using Adobe Premiere. Adobe Premiere is also editing software, althought a lot older than Final Cut. The screengrab shows the many transitions and effects available in the bottom right corner, and the professional contrast between the programmes are evident as the basic Adobe Premiere didn't provide you with these kinds of technology and tools.

Photoshop was essential to creating our soap trailer poster and television magazine front covers. The magnetic lasso tool was something I used regularly, as it made cutting out images easy, without having to make the area around the image transparent manually. Another plus with the tool is that you don't miss bits out, so when you paste it onto the poster and magazine background it wouldn't look messy, unlike how I used to do it.

Although I had only had little experience with Photoshop, and that was mainly cutting out the characters, it was also needed for the soap trailer itself. As we decided, through research, to promote our soap trailer on the E4 channel, we needed to create a banner for it to make it as realistic as possible. We found the image, and used the clone tool to cover the original text by blending the purple over it and making it look consistant.

To the left is an image of the recording device Esi Rekord M. I had only used it once previously, but due to that little experience, I knew how to use it effectively. We used this device to record our voiceovers for our soap and in our previous evaluation task, and we found it was much more useful than recording our voices with a video camera and seperating the video from the sound as background noise could interfere with it. We found the Esi Rekord M to be much better and clearer, and by holding it away from your mouth when speaking or by placing it on a table in front of you, you got the best results. 

As a way of research, I used Youtube to examine a variety of different trailers of the storylines in Eastenders, Coronation Street and Hollyoaks that were shared online. Doing this allowed me to broaden my understanding of soap conventions, such as camera shots and characters, and therefore making my soap trailer look much more professional. Using Web 2.0, we could also share our first draft and finished trailer on various websites and reciever feedback from friends, family, and even strangers who would give honest opinions.

Similarly, I uploaded the videos to Facebook as well. I felt this was important because I could immediately advertise the video to my friends and family, asking for their feedback. As social networks are so popular as of the moment, posting the video on facebook meant that we could get a lot more responses and age wise, the people who would see it would be around the age of our target audience.

To plan a lot of my tasks, I used Microsoft Office, and in particular Word. Word was essential as it meant we could plan and write our speech for our evauluation voiceover and colour code it so it was easier to read. Having all my basi cplanning on word was useful as I could keep it all together and go back and refer to it. Blogger was another website I used, and its essential purpose was to document all of my research and devlopment. Similar to Word, I could keep all my research in one place, but it was easier to access and the way I displayed my work was interesting and colourful.