Evaluation Question 4

                                 

ELITE4 EVALUATION Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction, research & planning and evaluation stages? Technologies used during post - production During the evaluation stages, almost all of the technologies used before have been used to aid our reflection of the film promotional package. Throughout this process, we have improved with this technology as we have grown in understanding in how to use it. This new technology allowed us to create products of high quality and standard that could be up to real media examples. This is because of technology being more accessible and easier to use which helps to have professionalism in the products produced and the skills gained. Evaluation Stage Magazine and Poster Construction Filming equipment was available through school although not used as much. A tripod was provided to make sure the camera was kept steady and did not shake during shooting as it would conform to the genre. A Nikon DSLR was the primary camera during each shoot. This channel of access allowed the shots captured to be extremely high quality for watching - from 720p to 1080p which provide clear visuals and so be true to the process in which real promotional packages are made. Technologies used during research After capturing the photos for the magazine cover and poster, they were sorted out from to determine the shot that would be used and edited through Photoshop CS6 which is different from Photoshop elements as it has more features and is used more by professionals in the industry and required a fair amount of knowledge and experience to use. Fortunately, We had experience with Photoshop Elements through AS media coursework and practiced with the shots produced before making real drafts to grasp the more advanced software. At the beginning of the project, primary and secondary research was conducted on the assigned genre in which the film package was required to be like. Google was the main search engine used to look for codes and conventions of poster, front magazine cover and trailer of the police crime thriller genre. This research was mostly primary in which a survey was conducted quickly through survey monkey and distributed through website links and email to get the initial thoughts and feeling from a range of potential customers. Technologies used whilst Filming To show these findings, the online presentation maker Slide share imported the standard Microsoft PowerPoint file into an online, readable format, and that is why it was used. YouTube also played a role for research as a vox pop video was created to gain qualitative responses from watching real media trailers such as Inception and The Dark Knight Rises. Genre and audience mood boards (collages of images) were created using Photoshop CS6, to fully capture the elements of the genre and audience demographics which helped produce the final products Research Technologies Continued Adobe Kuler was an online adobe application allowing cross convergence as the adobe photoshop colour picker could pick the color chosen from the site to be placed in the products, an example would of been adding a specific shade of grey and blue to fit this colour scheme from past media texts of the genre. Dafont.com like last year allowed for a font to be chosen as the typography, we needed a strong and easily readable font which was found on dafont and used as the primary font throughout our range of products. Voicethread was used to indicate how we produced the product, providing a step by step guide with audio - visuals to aid understanding of why did specific alterations to the images such as only showing half of the characters in the character poster. For the planning stages, a pitch, story board and shot list were produced, these were all scanned onto our blogs for storage and show where we were at. The magazine and poster were also hand drawn and scanned to give an idea of what we wanted the products to look like before actually producing them. This also enabled us to get audience feedback through the comments on the blog, which we could then incorporate into our final version. Blogger is also part of google meaning that a single gmail account could access the functions of blogger but also drive as well as they are linked. Blogger is simply a blog to store all content produced from the initial idea to the evaluation. Blogger was a better idea of storing the projects content as problems such as missing work had occurred when using wiki spaces last year.  Mobile Technology Comparison of AS to A2 Smartphones played an important part of all stages in this project as apps such as Whatsapp allowed free group communication and so photos were shared, schedules were made and constant check ups on each other so that the right post were posted onto blogger. Phone calls were also used when smartphones either ran out of wifi range or 3G data Due to an increase in the media department, the old window desktops were replaced with Macs and mac books along with the software needed to create the products such as the adobe software and garage band, these had faster processors which reduced the time in waiting for videos to render and Photoshop to respond. This is also enabled time to be delegated effectively as there was enough mac books to supply the class and help group members to focus on particular parts which would be pieced together later on. Google Drive was an important online (cloud) storage tool as the group had to constantly upload and exchange the work produced to each other. This enabled every member of the group to be up to date in the production process, leading to decisions made quicker as content was readily available online. During post - production we used Premiere which is a video editing software, the programme allowed us to make a trailer through the sorting of clips, editing effects such as constant power - transitions between shots and leveling the sound of each shot that was filmed. Aftereffects allowed for a production company - Elite4 to be rendered in preparation for the trailer which is a must (rule) when making a trailer. Aftereffects allowed for even more video manipulations as our trailer has a tint effect throughout which is similar to the blue like effect that the Borne series has. When music was unavailable Garageband was used with its extensive range of computer generated instruments, sounds and music were produced and then implimented within the trailer through import into premiere.