How did you use media technologies in the

construction and research,planning and

evaluation stages?

Well for starters Youtube.com was one of the

most invaluable resources for my research and

planning. YouTube is a video sharing website that

without it I feel would have had great difficulty

viewing proper examples of real sports- drama

teaser trailers. This allowed me to draw

inspiration and view appropriate examples to

then take ideas and utilise them within my own

teaser trailer. YouTube was also very useful when

it came to sharing my teaser trailer across the

web as it allowed me to distribute my finished

media piece across the world via this site.

Camera – Lumix G2 HD

The Lumix G2 HD was the camera that I used

in order to take all of my pictures and film all

of the scenes within my film trailer in glorious

High definition! This helped to keep the

scenes looking very focused and smooth,

while also helping to make the footage seem

somewhat professional. The only real issues

that I encountered while using this piece of

equipment was that I felt the zooming ability

of the camera was not very small, making the

transition from full view to a zoomed shot

seem jumpy and unstable. Other than that I

feel this was the perfect camera for my

coursework.

IMDB

IMDB stands for The Internet Movie Database

which does exactly what it says on the tin. It holds

a vast amount of information about most films on

its website. This helped provide an inside look

into how films are rated and reviewed and what

effects/ conventions work well for each genre and

within the most successful films. It also contains

plot synopsis’ on films which helped me to plan

my own plot once again by looking at the highest

rated sports films and taking elements of those

plots and incorporating the ideas into my own

trailer.

Adobe Photoshop CS6

Photoshop was the main software I used for

editing my photos, after utilising it somewhat

last year in AS media I felt quite confident in

my abilities with it this year and feel that it

helped to make my final production pieces

more effective and give it that ‘airbrushed’

look that you often see within magazines and

posters.

IMovie

IMovie is a piece of film editing software that

could only be accessed by MACS and not on

windows pc’s which turned out to be slightly

problematic when wanting to update my

trailer outside of college as I do not own a

MAC. However when I was able to use it, it

turned out to be an absolutely fantastic piece

of software that was very versatile and

offered numerous video effects and

transitions that help to bring together my

final production nicely. It did take viewing a

couple of IMovie tutorials on YouTube before

I could effectively edit my clips however after

learning it was pretty easy.

Garage Band

Garage Band is another piece of software that

can only be used on the MAC’s. Garage band

is used to create and/or remix your own

soundtracks. It offers a vast amount of royalty

free clips that can be used and distributed

freely within your own productions. It was

rather simple to use and just needed to use a

file converter after creating my final music

piece in order to convert it from a garage

band file into an mp3 file in order to utilise it

within my IMovie. I also downloaded an extra

royalty free mp3 clip of a heartbeat from a

legal free music website which I was able to

incorporate into my music piece and provide

a better level of tension throughout my

trailer.

Blogger

Blogger is the website I used to post my progress both

through my As and my A2 course and likely the website you

are now viewing this on. Before using blogger for the first

time I did have some blogging experience after using a

website named Tumblr so I found the whole blogging

experience rather easy. By blogging my progress I feel it has

really help with the process of developing my final piece to a

decent standard, by blogging it allows you to look back and

reflect on past research and ideas that will make sure that

you incorporate them into your final piece. It also helped a

great deal to organise my work and also I personally believed

that by blogging all of my media work it motivated me to

work at a higher standard as I knew that I was going to have a

wider audience than just the teachers marking my work, it

was the whole world that would be viewing my work!

Blogger was an excellent tool overall for presenting various

media texts in the forms of images, videos, hyperlinks and

embedded presentations creating a media rich piece of

coursework.

Slideshare

Slideshare was an effective way of creating

powerpoints and uploading them onto the

internet. Before discovering Slideshare I

would have uploaded separate images of

each individual slide from a powerpoint onto

the blog which was very inefficient. However

with slideshare I have been able to fully

upload my powerpoint’s onto the internet

and embed them into my blog.

Prezi

Prezi is very similar to ‘SlideShare’ in the

essence that it provides a way to view

presentations online. However Prezi offers it

in a more creative and inspiring way, using

images, colours and spider diagram-like

layouts it allows the user to take the audience

on a journey with their work and helps to

show how their work progressed.

Isuu

Isuu is exactly what you are looking at now, a

website that allows you to create virtual book

for you to then place on the web and on your

blog for instance. Once again adding variance

to my work and saturating my blog with more

media forms.