Evaluation Q.4

Q4. How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

Media technologies are the electrical components used to make our film through pre production, production, and post production. These technologies consist of things like Adobe premier for example.

For the research stage I went into in-depth analysis of past materials which related to my theme ideas manhood. I used YouTube get clips from films which deal with this issue i.e. I found a clip in the film Baby Boy where a man get’s attacked by youths, then he returns to restore is manhood by beating them up, the clip is so emotional and gave me a real sense of direction and made me build the link between manhood and emotions which I feel made our film a success. I also used Google to look for news articles and song lyrics which relates to manhood and I made this into a little poster which you can see. I also looked at what provokes testosterone levels to flair, finding some very interesting stuff like i.e. a male protecting his family if he thought they were in eminent danger. These are the sorts of things which we gather inspiration from and put into our final product making the internet very useful. I also took a voice note on my blackberry and asked a couple males within my family what they though manhood was about and how dose it effect the modern. They came back with some interesting feedback which has really helped me in the creation of my film, giving me a

 insight into how people react when your manhood is being tested, and how the idea of manhood has transformed over time. This use of technology has helped me move one step closer to making a realistic filmed based on manhood.

As we moved on to planning of our film we used various technologies to perform our task, one of the main things we had to do was find a cast due to the fact we had quite a number of characters. To find these actors to play these roles I first went onto social networking sites like Facebook, and posted this add various times with know serious responses. I then looked into sites like star now a great website for finding actors and actresses, we got some replies but one for one reason or another they couldn't play the role. Instead of continually trying these unsuccessful sites, I used my phone and quite simply asked close reliable friends to be my actors, and for the role of Linda we used the director’s mother which was also simply arranged. So the first pieces of  new media failed me although in this sense but with technology there are always faults, and I still got to find my actors in enough time conveniently using a slightly older piece of technology; the mobile phones. For the construction of the storyboard I use a basic 2.0 megapixel blackberry camera to record the pitch of the storyboard. This was a great way to show our work on the blog using new media technology, it is also quite ideal to look back on it and write about what we did. Also the use of the blog is a new media technology which is extremely important through this whole media course, because it is were we store all our work and as media students gives us new ways to be creative technologically. We also used a basic software called Microsoft Word which is relatively old although was very helpful in the planning stages of my film, we did a lot of work on there such as making our call sheet which is very important because it has the cast details on it. We also used it to create our script. This is how a very basic technology was used in the making of ‘Take the next step’.

Various new technologies was used in the construction of the project as you could imagine, when shooting we used a Cannon XHAi camera and a Libec tripod, which had various tools to make filming advanced like being able to change the focus this was used near the end as Linda was sitting watching T.V the purpose of this was to create an illusion we was going into her life, and dim and brighten the shots whilst filming this helped in the house scenes as there was minimal lighting within the house. We also used tracking poles to create a tracking shot at the Upney walk in centre to make the shot look like we was going into John’s head.  This helped create more exciting and “extraordinary” shots. After shooting ‘Take the next step’ we filmed some extra material of the cast and crews reaction to the whole project, to collect high quality audio we used a microphone to improve the clarity, which just improves the overall quality of my work and puts across to the examiner that I really spent time and cared about the project; which of course we did. During post production we used Adobe premier we first digitised the shots, and then began cutting them into a basic run, after this we began to tighten the shots. We then used fades and used the sound control to make the music flow in and out. After editing we rendered the images to make it into a compatible file, so we could watch ‘Take the next step’ on various software’s like Windows media player. These are the new media technologies used whilst in the construction and post production stages of our film.

Prezi’s was another way I transformed my work into a new media technology, making it easier to view my work with pictures and videos I used it when discussing potential film magazine for my film article. This has helped work on presentation and creativity; I enjoyed using the software so much that I used it many times through the media academic year. Here is a shot of the work I did on the new technology.  Separately we had to make 3 posters for the marketing campaign of ‘Take the next step’. Although before we could do this we had to undergo some research into how is a film poster of our genre drama is made. That was done mainly by using the World Wide Web which has numerous amounts of information on countless things across the globe, this form of technology was useful and was the most influential and important technology I used for the project. When making the posters I used Photoshop using both graphical and photographical imaging. This with the advanced tools on the software like cropping, duplicating, the magic wound was key in cropping the characters faces in poster 3 so I could fade them into the clouds., adding fades, filters and many other useful devices. After creating the posters on Photoshop I had to convert the images into a J.PEG to make it compatible to go onto the blog. This new media technology helped me to make my posters look professional and gave space to be creative and create almost anything you wanted.

To conclude during the project of ‘Take the next step’ we used many forms and verities of new media technologies which made the project exciting and different, in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages of media the A2 course.