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

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

By Benjamin Haines

Wordpress

From the beginning of the media studies course I have used wordpress to record all of my leaning . I use wordpress as my leaning journal as other that have taken other subjects in school would use notepad or book. I have typed posts for most of my research and planning stages but also used wordpress for my construction and evaluation stages as well as posting various stuff that will link in with each section. We were given the option to use wordpress this year as Iweb was not very good or reliable last year. When I first started using wordpress it was hard to get to terms with compared to Iweb and it was hard to lay everything out, but once I experimented with wordpress and found out new things I think that it is better than Iweb and more efficient as well. Plus I was able to follow my fellow students that were on the same course as me and see what they were posting at the same time. This was an advantage this year, as last year we did not have the luxury to do this on Iweb . Another thing I liked was you could get feedback straight away from teachers and fellow students on your work by uploading it to Wordpress and them commenting on the post. I could also accesses this website (wordpress) from anywhere for example, on my phone, computer ( of any type) or IPod this was an advantage again as Iweb would only allow you to access it on a Mac and, if students don’t have a Mac at home, you could not carry on with work in your spare time but this year we could and this helped a lot of students with the coursework. I found that wordpress could support videos, images and sound as well compared to Iweb which couldn’t, this was a great way to present your work in a different format rather than just typing.

PhotoshopI think Photoshop is a useful and excellent piece of software and would happily recommend it to anyone that is looking for editing software for any subject. I only needed to use Photoshop in my construction part of my coursework and that was for the two ancillary's of the poster and magazine cover. Photoshop allowed me to take a normal photo I have taken and turn it into something more realistic and to create whatever I wanted in this case it was a horror genre poster and magazine and I mange to really think outside the box and edit in anything I thought would work to make my poster and magazine look professional and realistic. Photoshop all depends on what you are trying to create and what tools you use within Photoshop as it has different ranges of tools and settings because some might work with what you are trying to capture and some might not. From my poster and magazine below you can really see what a difference Photoshop makes and how I have took my time to create the best possible poster and image I could. For my poster I turned the models skin grey and also changed the colour of her eyes to give the model the horror and possessed look towards the audience

As you can see the difference in the skin tone and the colour we chose for the eyes

For my magazine I took an image from a picture we took at the photo shoot and cut out all of the background and the models body, made it black and white, changed the effect to transparent and got the level of transparent balanced enough to see the boys feet underneath

Here you can see the stages

You can see how I added in the claw marks on the tree in the horror poster. W e found the image on Google and added it onto the tree and also made the claw marks have dark glow and added some black in this made it look more realistic

InDesign Adobe InDesign I have worked with InDesign before and find it easy to learn your way around the software and I believe that it is a reliable software gear. It allowed me to open my edited images. I edited on Photoshop and add in the typography for my two ancillary's such as masthead, tag lines, slogan, barcode, quotes, sell lines, banner, colour scheme etc.. InDesign allowed me to progress my work and make it more realistic and more professional . Also I like the fact the software does not take that long to load up like other software, but on the down side of things, if I save work on one mac I cant access it from any other mac other than using a portable hard drive or memory stick. This is a disadvantage as my partner and me would want to work on the mac and InDesign in our spare time, but other classes and students would be using our mac so we could not work on it.If you look below I will show how I have developed my two ancillary's from the previous stage to now using InDesign.

Could not chose from two fonts in the end you can see what one we went with and I think the outcome works better

My magazine development on InDesign

Before and after shots and as you can see InDesign makes a big difference

iMovieI only used iMovie for my construction stage of my coursework and evaluation for my construction. I used it to edit my trailer and for my evolution I used it to edit my question 3 audience feedback. For my trailer I imported the video clips I needed to use and edit the movie by using different transitions, optimize the video quality and stabilize my video clips to make the trailer look more efficient. I could also add in sound effects and songs to make the trailer look more realistic. The things I like about iMovie is it has loads of different features, you can experiment with and create loads of different projects from blogs, trailer, review videos, music videos etc.. The bad things about iMovie are it freezes at points and also crashes. It crashed on my partner and I once and we had to redo some of our trailer. This set us back, as time was not on our side. Also, when you go to export the audio is sometimes out of sync and this again is a time wasting problem. But without iMovie I wouldn't’t have been able to create my trailer or part of the evaluation

Here are some screenshot from our trailer and iMovie.

YouTubeI used YouTube at all stages of my coursework. YouTube is one of the worlds biggest networking sites in the world and has hundreds of people uploading their own videos. In my research and planning stage I used YouTube to analysis horror genre trailers and also I uploaded a video for the research part in getting audience focus group and talking about the horror genre. In my construction part I used YouTube to find out how to use Photoshop to the best of my ability, and I also uploaded our trailer on to YouTube. For my evaluation stage I uploaded question 3 about audience feedback. YouTube had helped me so much in all stages and without it I could not show everyone the videos I have created or I could not have done my research and planning without it. I rate You Tube al lot and I use it in my day to day life.