How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the project i have used many different media technologies to help with the work, one website which i have used for the duration of the project is Blogger, an online blogging site on which i've uploaded all my completed media work. this method is a lot more effective than having hard copies of my work as it is stored online and one place so it is easy to find my work and to see how much of the project i have completed. Also the ability to upload different medias such as videos, images and text makes it so useful as project blogging site.
Another site that i used frequently, especially in the research and planning stage is YouTube, a site which allowed me to research multiple different TV adverts and sponsorship sequences and also put them on my blog to analysis. This made the research and planning stage a lot easier as it was easy to find existing media examples such as the Nike and Adidas commercials, these gave us the main inspiration for our advert and also sponsorship sequence.
Programmes on the Macs used in the project were really helpful too, such as Word, Excel and Final Cut amongst others. Word, as well as Google Docs made it easy for me to type out documents and easily save them whereas typing straight into Blogger can be risky as it doesn’t auto save. From there it was easy to copy over text into my Blog and have it. Excel came in handy when it came to feedback as we easily type up questionnaire answers and turn them into visual representations such as graphs and charts.
Final Cut was used to edit all four of our tasks including the two adverts, sponsorship sequence and radio advert. When using Final Cut it was difficult at first to completely understand and use fluently but after a while of using it, it became second nature. Early problems that developed were the issue of rendering, which had to be done after you made any change, this made the editing process quite long and monotonous.
Generally the programme was good to use and definitely helped with my project. The various effects that came with the programme were very helpful, such as the fade in and outs as well as slow motion and also the ability to add text really easily, these combined to make the process fairly straight forward and gave me the ability to create a professional looking advert.
A key piece of hardware used was a Nikon DSLR, which we used to shot all our footage. Traditionally a handheld camera, but it recording abilities where just as good and enabled us to record in high definition quality, again making our advert look more professional. The compact size of the DSLR made it very easy to maneuver, to achieve a variety of shots and angles without to much effort. Furthermore, the camera’s easily usable features such as the focus changer, made it easy to achieve more ambitious and professional shots such as focus pulls.
