Evaluation of our use of New Media Technologies

What is ‘New’ Media Technology?

The media industry has changed due to the increased use of digital technology since the move from analogue to digital in the 1980’s.

Definitions of New Media• Digital, interactive and collaborative-

everything’s being shared• You can view it anywhere at home,

work and school with the use of tablets, smartphones and laptops

• It is global so it can be viewed anywhere

• However, it can be seen as controversial because not everyone believes it is ‘new’ or even that it is particularly widespread and common

• Sites such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are used to represent ourselves. We could argue that we are representing ourselves as media students and as people

Research

New media could be expected to make research interactive, collaborative and shared with various groups.

Use of Internet

Advantages of Search Engines• It is an easy way to access information posted by many people• It is easy to research trailers, posters and magazine covers• We’ve found lots of information that we weren’t originally focusing

on• We are allowed to filter if we’re looking for something more specific

Research was interactive and collaborative

We have also searched movie websites such as IMDb which allowed us to find factual information that is reliable and would be hard to find elsewhere.

It is free and easy to find and access which is an advantage for ‘new’ media.

Relies on a kind of wiki culture of collaborative writing and research

IMDb

Collecting knowledge from varied sources is one of the key advantages of ‘new’ media.

YouTube

• YouTube has showed us what psychological thriller trailer looks like

• By looking at trailers, it guides us to a similar genre trailers in the suggestion section

Comments on trailers allow for a picture of what audiences want – another kind of collaborative culture.

Disadvantages-Google

• Not all the images are relevant so it was hard for us to search images as part of our research

The sharing capacity of new media can become overwhelming and disorganised.

Disadvantages of YouTube

• Lots of fan videos and parody may be mistaken for the official trailer

• “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” – many versions here, which is the ‘real’ one? New media opens up the relationship

between audiences and institutions but this is not always positive – sometimes you want a distinction.

Finding Music (Advantage)

It’s free

There’s a wide range of music to choose from

The music is copyright-free – this is the very essence of new media, finding sharable work like this music.

Disadvantages of Free Music

• The choices are too wide and are unspecific• It’s time consuming to listen to all the choices on offer• We only needed clips from the music but we had to

download the whole track• It is hard to find specific tracks• The music sometimes doesn’t link to the genre that we’ve

selected – who is in charge of labelling and tagging?

Reflects the fact that much of the collaborative and shared work on new media platforms is unregulated and only organised out of good will – there is no official responsibility for this to happen, and where work is free, there is not as much incentive to please the customer and less fear of losing them.

Planning

Storyboarding

Animated StoryboardWe imported the photos of our storyboard in the planned order

We added text using LiveType to show our planned dialogue showing cross-media convergence

Our clips were then dragged down to form a time line and trimmed the length of time the photographs would be shown for to give us an estimate of the timescale

The viewer allowed us to view our animatic to get an impression of how the final trailer will turn out

Benefits of the Animatic over a Drawn Storyboard

• We were able to get an impression of how our final trailer would end up looking like and as we had an idea of the timings, we could prioritize which shots we should film incase it ended up being too long

• It allowed us to alter the storyboard by adding and deleting new shots

• It also allowed us to add audio tracks to help plan on matching the source footage to our audio track when we eventually filmed it

Problems with the Animatic

• It was often difficult to take clear photographs as images sometimes came out unclear depending on the lighting and distance between the image and the camera so we often had to retake and reimport images

• It also became quite time consuming when trimming the photographs as there were a lot of them

Schumm points out that only the technologically competent can benefit from the new media culture. Where there are issues using the technology, using old media may in fact be more beneficial and achieve better effects.

Social Media

Imagined Use of Social Media

Many movies incorporate Facebook and Twitter pages as part of their promotional campaign to help promote their film, get feedback from their audience and push them to by merchandise such as DVDs

Photographs, posters and trailers would be available to view as well as information about characters and potential sequels

Social media encapsulates the sharing and collaborative nature of new media technology.

Presenting Planning on Blogger

Accessibility• The blog is open to everyone to view and

comment just by entering the blogs web address

• We are able to view the blog at home, school and on smartphones

• It is organized in chronological order under titles so it is easy to refer back to certain aspects

• We used labels so we could just look at one persons work

Blogging illustrates the global nature of new media culture.

Using Different Media - Images

We used text and images so when we are talking about a shot from a trailer, a poster or a magazine cover, it is more user friendly as they can see what we are talking about

Using Different Media - Hyperlinks

Most of the trailers we researched were on YouTube so we were able to show everyone what videos we found for the rest of the group to look at and they could see what we said about them on the same page.

Using Different Media- Videos and Presentations

We also had videos and slideshow presentations (hosted on slideshare) to share our research in a format we felt was better suited to that task.

New media allows a variety of presentational formats to be used within the same piece of work. It encourages and promotes cross-media convergence.

Construction

Final Cut Express

Advantages

Tools

One advantage of Final Cut Express is that there are a range of tools that enable the user to manipulate the footage in many different ways depending on which tool they choose.

BrowserEffects

Viewer Canvas

Time Line

Tool Palette

Manipulating Material

FCE allows the user to cut out the material using the razor tool they don’t want and easily delete them, and then re-order the remaining material into how it suits them.

You are able to add as many layers as you need meaning that sound and images can overlap, which is especially useful for non-diegetic music and diegetic at the same time.

The original footage is stored within the browser, meaning that if we made a mistake, we can easily come back to this. This allows us to be more adventurous in our creative decision making.

Reversibility is a key feature of new media technology. Few decisions are permanent and cannot be undone, leading to more freedom to experiment.

Effects and TransitionsFCE provides us with several different effects and transitions. One of the main ones we used was a dissolve, this was particularly used for our chameleon ident to give it a smooth transition from green to brown and then green again.

For our flash back scenes we decided to add on a filter over the footage to give it a slightly different colour and have the transition, luminance map, to go into it to signify it is a flashback, and that it is not happening currently.

In the flashback scene we included a zoom to get more of the main characters reaction.

This is a good example of the “creativity of selection” associated with new media.

Combining and Manipulating Sound

The pen tool allowed us to pin out points of the sound that either needed to be enhanced or softened without changing the rest of the track.

It is useful to have layers as it allows different sound effects at once. However this means you need to balance out the diegetic and non-diegetic music volume. We decided it would be best to have the voiceover to be the loudest as that is what the audience need to be listening to.

Technological ConvergenceWe used Photoshop to make the title and ident, and then imported them into Final Cut Express where they were cut and music added.

This is the kind of convergence new media is often associated with.

Disadvantages

Pre-Packaged Solutions Is new media making us lazy? As we have pre-packaged solutions, there is less need to be creative in making original effects or transitions.

The choices are limited (for example, transitions), and so as a result we have to settle for what they have to offer, even if you had something you wanted in particular.

Accessibility

We don’t have full access to it all the time. FCE is expensive to get and so we are only able to work on it from school as most of us don’t have it at home.

When new to Final Cut Express you need to learn how to be able to use it effectively which could be quite time consuming as it is pretty complicated.

New media is associated with democracy and availability to all – but this is not always the case.

Photoshop

Advantages

Manipulating Images

Easy to import JPEG’s.

Using the Magnetic Lasso tool, we were able to extract these images onto a separate background.

This was not as simple as just extracting them however, we needed to use the clone stamp tool to replace parts of the image that were accidentally lost.

We needed to also use the zoom and blur tools to ensure that our image blended with the background being used.

Manipulating Images

Asides from the main images, we also had a few smaller images of blood drops which we had to re-colour and re-size accordingly the image and background.

We were also able to add in shapes to our products. For example, here in our magazine cover we have (the making of) a rectangular block, and also we have a circular shape with teaser text inside

Manovitch associates new media technology with a “creativity of selection”.

Manipulating ImagesWe were also able to adjust the image’s size (height/width) if it didn’t quite fit.

This was especially useful as we needed to resize the three characters quite drastically to suit our final image. (Above)

We also had to resize, and re-colour, some of the blood splats as well.

Layering ImagesMagazine covers and posters are products that have to be made up of many different layers to ensure it appears authentic.

It is clear that in our products we used many different layers ourselves.

Each letter of ‘Invisible Strings’ was a separate layer, and each group of teaser text and each shape was also.

This was ultimately very useful because we needed certain images or text to overlap each other, however, it could be frustrating when there was so many because if you haven’t labeled the layer, it can take you ages to find the one you need.

New media requires you to think in very specific ways

Disadvantages

Disadvantages

Photoshop can be time-consuming because if an extraction goes wrong, you have little choice but to start again

This is the same with rubbing out parts of the image.

There are only so many tools, for example, you cannot make your own font which would have been useful for the credit block.

Template Credit Block:

Our Credit Block:

Disadvantages The tools are not always efficient: we attempted a block at the bottom of our magazine cover, however, we have had to re-do it numerous times because placing the images on top of it was proving difficult.

As seen here:

New media can aid your creativity but it can’t make you more creative than you actually are.

New Media for Evaluation

Use of BloggerAs discussed for research and planning, it is the interactive, collaborative nature of Blogger that makes it such a useful site for storing our feedback.

We have been able to store our work in a logical fashion, view each other’s work and keep returning to all our previous posts so that we have been able to evaluate the whole experience, not only the finished product.

New media is particularly well suited to making the process of evaluation more ongoing and reflective rather than summative; we would argue that we have been evaluating throughout and many of our research and planning posts are in fact evaluative.

Feedback

Blogger allowed us to exchange work with another school that we did not know and get valuable feedback on or work from an outside perspective.

This is the true value of new media technology – being able to work with people in a professional community without needing direct contact.

Use of Slideshow Technology

A real advantage of Blogger is the way it fosters the use of a multimedia format. The slideshow was a good choice for this evaluation because we were able to work separately but collaboratively and we needed a strong visual element to illustrate our ideas with concise text.

Use of Edited Presentations

To evaluate our use of audience feedback, we filmed a presentation. This allowed us to discuss more complex ideas around bias and neutrality in more detail. We were able to add visual support and a kind of contents summary using LiveType, making the format as easy to use as possible.

Use of Contact Sheets and Notes

This contact sheet was a good choice of format for evaluating genre and form because it is such an instant visual representation of many of our mise-en-scene choices. It was made on Photoshop and uploaded to Blogger.

Use of YouTube Tutorial

We liked the idea of presenting our work as an online tutorial because we have frequently used these ourselves and know how helpful they can be. We therefore feel that this is one of the examples of the way new media technology shares expertise that can we identify most closely with and vouch for.

Benefits of Multimedia Format

New media is very associated with a multimedia format and technological convergence. This has benefitted our evaluation because we have been able to use a full range of exploratory techniques, from full on discussions to the compression needed for a PowerPoint slide, with lots of visual support.