1. 3. How did you use technologies in
the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
By Laurena Etwi

2. My most frequently used technological platform during my Foundation
and Advanced Portfolio was the ‘WordPress’ blog, which was
introduced to me by my lecturer as an aid to make my work more
accessible.
It enabled him to keep track of my progress through the duration of
my media course, which was effective as I was able to receive feedback
directly and quickly via posts and comments from him.
In addition to this, having a blog also meant that people who were not
just national but also international could access my work and
communicate with me through it by commenting on my posts. This
allowed me to share my work with a wider variety of people at the
same time and this is where the benefits of technological advances
were really useful.

3. Another well-established platform that I used was Facebook, where I
shared my trailer on my page to encourage feedback from my
Facebook friends.
However people did not respond with any feedback. This is a common
risk factor that you may encounter when requesting feedback from
people online, mainly due to the fact that you can never be sure that
people will respond as online feedback means you rely on volunteers.

4. Most of my work was done on Apple Mac computers as these are the
computers my school provides for its media students, so that high
quality work can be produced.
Using a MAC computer was a new experience for me and I was
therefore not very proficient in using the programs and also not
entirely familiar with the way the computers worked. I however
developed and became more skilled and confident throughout the
duration of my course and I believe to now be a confident user.
At the start of my Foundation portfolio I was already familiar with
programs such as Word and PowerPoint, and I therefore did not have
to practice before using them for my work.
Due to the user friendliness of these programs, I used them frequently
for presentations and other written aspects of my coursework. As
previously mentioned they are simple to use and are in an accessible
format which makes them compatible to most computers and even
other devices such as PDA's, tablets and Smart phones.

5. I initially used a Panasonic handy cam to film my trailer, but as this did
not give me high quality shots I unfortunately had to re-film all my
footage with a different device.
I decided to look into using my iPhone 5 and found that it gave me HD
quality shots and worked a lot better than the camera I was initially
using. My iPhone 5 was very simple to use as I was already familiar
with using it and it was also portable due to its size which made
working with it a lot more practical. The HD quality was especially
evident in my trailer shots when showing an extreme close-up or
zooming with focus and also when in natural lighting as this really
complimented the phone’s 8 megapixel camera.

6. Internet
For my research gathering I used the search engine google, and
therefore the internet a lot as I relied on it for finding existing media
texts which were similar to the one I produced. Researching was an
important aspect of my pre-production especially but also during post-
production and by having access to the internet this was a lot easier.
I visited websites such as IMBD and YouTube daily and shared my
PowerPoint presentations on ‘Slideshare’, these all require the internet
in order to access them. I found it useful to use the internet as one of
the ways of conducting research as it so limitless and you can find
current and up-to-date information whereas other sources might be
out-dated and limited to a certain extent e.g. printed books as they
can’t be updates as quickly as the internet .

7. When it came to editing the trailer, I used iMovie rather than Adobe
Premier as I found it easier to understand and work with. I also found
that iMovie worked for my trailer as it allowed me to do things like add
effects and filters and change the pitches of voice-overs when I felt this
was necessary.
This program however required a lot of research, as I did not know how
to use it at first. The internet (YouTube tutorials) and help from people
around me who did know how to use the program, helped me
understand most tools and how to use them to edit my trailer. I did find
out after my production that people who used Adobe Premier did have
certain advantages, which included a wider variety of transitions, sound
effects, texts etc.

8. iMovie made it easy for me to access my videos when editing as it
stored it in an internal library within the software. Exploring my movie
was also very simple on iMovie as it even gave me the choice of
quality, including phone format, computer format and HD quality and
it also gave me the chance to straight away upload it to YouTube if I
wished to.
My voice recordings were recorded onto my iPhone and as the Mac
was also from Apple I was able to use iTunes to download and import
music and voice-overs directly into iMovie. Another privilege of the
products both being Apple products, was that sharing of videos, songs
etc. was possible through Airdrop, which acts in a similar way as
Bluetooth as it is instant and user friendly.

9. I designed a simple poster with a QR
code that I created
on http://qrcode.littleidiot.be/ , this
was quick and easy and really made use
of new media as many people have
smart phones in modern society due to
the rise in technological advances this
has become the norm.
The main reason why I was able to
produce all my work to the best of my
ability was due to the rise of new media
which includes the iPhone I used for
filming, the MAC computer for
recording for instance my evaluation
video and many other sections of my
coursework, over all I believe this really
gave me an advantage to people who
may not have had these technological
apparatus.