1. By Henrietta Lawrence Van Pooss Evaluation- 4) How did you use technologies within construction, research, planning and the evaluation stages? 2. The different technologies that I have used over the last two years have aided me in what I wanted to achieve and have gathered a larger understanding and knowledge of what types of technology to use. The most extensive use of technology have been in the planning and construction stages which have been then applied to aid the designs of the research and evaluation stage which have been developed from the first year through to the second year. Even though they have been different productions, the way you research information is done in the same way however, the planning and the construction stages have used different technologies to cater for the different types of productions. 3. First Design Second Design 4. First Design Second Design 5. The research from the first year was carried out by the help of the internet and advice from teachers and peers. As the first year was a year in which you would get to understand how media works and how to use the different technologies, you did not know what technology to use and how to use it therefore, the advice from teachers and gathered information from the internet proved to be very useful. Sites such as Wikipedia were helpful gathering information about different theories and on different theorists which relate to media, this site has been verified to make sure that the information is correct through the history, as sites such as Wiki-answers are not reliable enough as the information can be manipulated and changed not giving completely trustful information. Other sites which proved useful in the research and planning stages were Prezi, SlideShare and Blogger, these demonstrated to be very helpful in gathering information and glide lines to how to present you information. 6. Prezi was a website which was introduced to us in the second year, as it was a new technology that we had not experienced before, by using Prezi in the research stages it helped get a grasp of how to navigate the website and what features were available; the website is initially an interactive PowerPoint, it is a great way of displaying information in a creative and visual way which allows the audience to be engaged with the presentation. http://prezi.com/8ngi7m_1y4zv/website- and-tv-channel-research/ - Here is a link to my first Prezi which is now 1 of 5. As in the first year to use as presentation software we used Blogger which helped in displaying the progress of our research, planning and construction of our productions. With this particular website it introduces us to the aspect of a HTML address, which could be accessed by the public on the internet, this which was used through the first and second year successfully to record our process. http://henriettalawrence3.blogspot.co .uk/ - Here is a link to my recent A- Level Blog. 7. SlideShare was another technology which was made known to us in the second year, as in the first year we predominantly used PowerPoint, this has a similar concept to Prezi in the way that the information could be shared online for others to see and comment on. Even though this was shown to be very useful, there was so much information to read that at times it would be hard to determine what information was reliable information. http://www.slideshare.net/HenriettaLawrence - Here is a link to my SlideShare profile which display all of the SlideShares that I have published. 8. In the second year we have been encouraged to use a wider range of technologies those that are on the internet but also external technologies. The other internet website I have used through the first year and the second year are YouTube Tutorials and a non- internet based but computer based software Adobe Photoshop, Windows Paint program and external technologies such as my Fuji FinePix S4900, 14MP, 30x Optical Zoom Digital Camera and an IPhone 5c. 9. YouTube tutorials were greatly used in the first year as we were exploring how to create certain effects and how to design the layout of the productions, these proved to be extremely helpful when research and the construction of the productions underwent. I needed to find out the generic layout of the front cover and the website so that the audience would find the navigation of the page familiar making the production There were not used as much in my second year as I was creating a website compared to a magazine front cover, so when creating the website I look more genera web pages that offered specific information on how create websites and while researching, came across different self-help websites to create a websites as near to other ones of its type in the industry today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxbC5 HKnT3o Here a link to YouTube Tutorial named- Photoshop: How to create a torn/ripped paper effect. This helped in creating an effect for my first year design of a magazine front cover. 10. While during the second year your understanding of how the different technologies work is greater, therefore, less time is spent researching that information again. This was completely a new technology that I had not used before so it took a while to explore the different websites which offered help and ended up choosing Moonfruit.com. However with further experimentation I found that this particular website was not achieving the layout and effects that I wanted for the website and there was also an issue with what the website limited you to do, which was something that I needed to work in my favour therefore, decided to look back into my research and choose Wix.com as it had the features and the capacity to achieve the final production to the require standard. http://henriettala wrence1.wix.com/ 6151tvwebsite- Here is a link to my A-level Final Main Production of a website. 11. Adobe Photoshop and Paint have been very useful technologies to use this year, as these soft wares helped create my Logo for the magazine advertisement which was one of my ancillary tasks. Here are a few pictures which show the process of creating the Logo. These were then put together and with using the conjoined designs in Photoshop a final logo was created. 12. This logo was achieve through the overlaying of designs, which were black and white, the colour was then inversed and made into a grey scale this was achieved through Microsoft Publisher. 13. The external technologies were the Digital Camera and the IPhone 5c helped capture the pictures which feature in my productions and record the process of how some of the pictures were created which were included on the Blog during the research and planning stage. The Digital camera was used greatly in the second year as they were more pictures which needed to be included on the website which included a larger variety of pictures. This is an aspect of the productions which progressed and improved with a deeper understanding of how to use it. The IPhone 5c is a technology which is relatively new, this helped in recording how the effect of different pictures were created, such as the advertisement picture. Exploring the different technologies has deepened my knowledge and understanding of how they work and how to create different effects, resulting in productions which are similar and could work as public productions. As well as using the camera for taking pictures, it was also used to film the beginning of an interview which would feature on the website. The camera was placed on a tri pod and filmed a medium close-up which would act as the main bulk of the interview. 14. Head shots, mid shots, extreme close-ups and shots that were different perspectives were also shots. Final Cut Pro was used in the editing of the video, this would help integrate the shorter videos and the interview video together to create a short video which would last approximately 1 minute. I decided to shoot in this way because the video Why Style Matters featuring Oswald Boateng became the inspiration to mould the videos together. A DSLR camera was used to create these videos as it was easier to use and found that the effects I wanted to create, could not be done on the Canon Camera I used before. The change of the cameras becomes apparent in the clip which features, a refocusing shot of the subjects accessories, this was created with a button on the back of the camera that you can press with your thumb to activate the autofocus. This means you can use your thumb to focus, and your forefinger to press the shutter when you want to shoot. Final Cut Pro: I found Final Cut Pro very good to use and helped create the effects that I wanted to create on the video clips. One effect that I found extremely useful which was the Dissolve effect. I firs found the effect under Video Transitions; displaying a list of choices which you could choose from, next was to drag the effect to the desired frame. To make the effect appear gradual rather than so apparent was to 'overlap' between the two clips and the media which is being used before or after the cut for each clip will dissolve into transition between them. These effect in particular helped create a smooth transition and brought the clips nicely together. 15. These are just some of the 100 pictures I had taken with my IPhone 5c and Digital camera. Videos were also taken with these technologies which feature on my blog and on the production of the website. Exploring the different technologies has deepened my knowledge and understanding of how they work and how to create different effects, resulting in productions which are similar and could work as public productions.
