Critical Evaluation - Question 4

(The text below is all of the information included in the video)

4- How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the first few weeks of our project I used the internet to research and plan our film. I visited popular sites including www.google.com and www.youtube.com to investigate the starting points of our project. I also used the website www.blogger.com to make a blog that would show the progression of our film. This has helped to improve my research skills and also my blogging skills. It also allowed me to design and create my own online blog.

Whilst blogging about our film I used my digital camera to take photographs for my work, I took all the photos for our photo storyboard, several for the props and a few for locations. By doing this I have improved my photography skills and also my planning skills as the photographs helped to plan out the shots for our film.

In order to actually create our project I used a Sony HDV camera and tri-pod to film the require scenes. I feel that I have improved my filming skills greatly and now have a better knowledge of the different shots that help make an effective piece, including eye-line match, graphic match and other creative shots. I believe that using the Sony HDV camera has helped improve my skills as it a very easy and simple piece of technology to use, that can be used in many different locations and still provide a professional result. The Sony HDV camera was incredibly easy to use and I didn’t really encounter any serious problems, the only one I can recall is that whilst filming the final scene I had great difficulty in white balancing the camera, after several attempts the shot still seemed to bright and therefore I had to film it and re-edit it on the computer. This took up quite a lot of filming and editing time.
I used the programme Final Cut Express on a Mac computer to edit our project. This programme is very effective and has helped enhance my creativity in order to edit our film into a successful final piece. I have definitely improved my editing skills and now have increased confidence with editing; I understand the different effects and edits that can be used on a film as I have used several different ones on our film. These include cross dissolve, speeding up a shot* and garbage matt. I found the garbage matt to be an incredibly valuable effect and used in twice in our project, I feel that without it our film would not have been as successful. I did not have many problems whilst editing our piece, the most common was that the Mac computer kept crashing and I was at a high risk of losing any unsaved editing. Also when re-arranging and adding in new footage I had to keep rendering our project which took up quite a lot of editing time.

I used the editing programme Photoshop 7.0 to design and construct our films poster. I used the tools available to edit the photo for our poster and to insert text and other features of posters. This has helped to improve my design and editing skills as I have now gained experience is film poster design.
In order to create a radio trailer for our film I used Garage Band to put our sound, which was recorded from a zoom recorder, together and to adjust it in order to make a realistic trailer. I used the programme to edit the volume and to arrange the sounds in the correct order. I feel that now my sound recording and editing skills have been enhanced and improved as I have never made a radio trailer before.
Overall I feel that all of the new media technologies I have used have helped to improve my media skills and on the whole have developed my creativity. I believe that I successfully overcame any problems I encountered with the equipment used and that I have created a successful final piece.