1. Evaluation Question 4
How did you use media technologies
in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation
stages?

2. Blogger
Blogger is the website we used to present all the work we produced, this ranges
from our research to our completed documentary. The website enabled us to
display videos and pictures as well as things such as power points. The website is
easy to use and lets you create drafts which meant I could continue to edit
them once I had finished. The website also allows you to upload videos, prezi’s
and also pictures onto your blogs, making them interactive.

3. Production
Throughout production we used a canon XM2 for all of our recording, this also included
a tape to capture all of our footage which . When filming still shots such as our
interviews we used a tripod, this helped keep the camera sturdy and make our
documentary look tidy and professional. When we filmed our interviews we used a clip
mic, although this created problems for us as the first time we tried to film two of our
documentary's we didn’t plug in head phones to check our mic was working, because
we didn’t do this we had to re-film these interviews which took up a lot of our
time, though it was also a good thing as the second ones we did were better because
we knew what worked well and we also decided on better questions to ask. Before
filming our documentary we had to plan what we were going to do, we did this by
creating a story board, then took pictures of them with a Samsung smart camera to
then upload to our blogs, this meant we could refer back to them to know what to
do, but also meant we could change our ideas to make them better.

4. Post Production - Editing
To edit our recordings we used Adobe Premiere Pro, this enabled us to capture clips of our
filming that we did want and also delete unwanted footage that had either gone wrong or
we didn’t want. Through the programme we were able to add transitions in between
different clips to edit out jumps, these transitions were things such as dip to black and cross
dissolves, these made the documentary transition well. We were also able to add music
through this programme and edit the sound levels to make it fit in well with the visuals. At
one point in the documentary the footage we had taken was too dark and so a tool on
the programme made it easy for us to brighten the image. When some of the footage was
shaking we could make the picture larger to give the effect that it wasn’t. at one point in
out documentary we have a cutaway that we wanted to speed up to make it drag on
less, this was easy to do through the programme and we could also slow it down if we
needed to. We also used this programme to create our radio advert.

5. Creating our poster
Firstly we decided and planned our poster and then took all the pictures we were going to
need, when we had all of our materials we added them to Photoshop to create our poster.
We found creating the poster rather difficult because there we many elements to what we
were trying to create, though this was made simpler by having layers that you could
separately edit. When we added the title we decided to change the colour to pink to
make it relate to what it was saying better. Because we had decided on what channel to
show our documentary on we got their logo off the internet and also used the same font to
display when it was being shown.

6. Hardware and software
Throughout our documentary we used a lot of hardware and software for not only the
production but also the post production. When doing work outside of college we used zip
drives so that we could then upload the work onto the college computers making it simple
and also time effective. Using the Samsung smart camera was an easy way to take all the
pictures we need, for example when we had to take pictures for our poster we were able
to upload them easily and quickly. When first planning our documentary we made many
notes on paper, and so that they weren’t lost or forgotten about we used a scanner to
upload them onto the computer so we could same them as pictures and easily access our
notes.

7. Microsoft and Blackberry
I used many Microsoft programmes in the creation of my research, for example I
used Microsoft Word to write our questionnaires and then used Microsoft Excel to
create the data into graphs to put onto our blogs. We used Microsoft Word for many
things such as our formal proposal and our filming and editing diaries, I find it easy to
use, I think things such as the spell check make it very useful and because of this I
usually write out my blog posts on their first before copy and pasting them into
blogger.

8. Internet programmes
When we had finished our documentary to put it onto our blogs we firstly needed to
upload them to YouTube, this made it simple to send it and to also do our audience
feed back as people could easily access it. Within our documentary we added
archive footage to make the opening sequence more exciting, we found all these
video clips on YouTube, this is also where we got our music, and using an online
converter we were able to put them into our documentary. With one of my
evaluation questions I decided to create a Prezi which is an internet site where you
can create interactive power points online. This site enabled me to make my
evaluation question more interesting by adding pictures and also ‘paths’ which is a
certain route the person viewing follows. The programme lets you add pictures and
videos to make it even more interactive.