What have you learnt about media technologies during the process?

Technology for

Research and Planning

Music

• We used Freeplay music to find Copyright- free music for our piece.

• This was very time-consuming as there was so much music on there and there is no quick way to choose without listening to excerpts

Filming Equipment Key part of planning = familiarising ourselves with filming equipment. Carried out many practise activities with Canon cameras Relatively easy to use and gave good results Transfer time long as mini DV rather than card Occasional focussing issues Constant charging of batteries needed

Stills camera – transfer using HD card so quicker and easirt

Easy viewing of photos taken

Steady image – could be attached to tripod

Filming Equipment

Focussing generally easier

Final Cut Express – Animated Storyboard

Photos of post-its taken and imported to Final Cut Express to create animated storyboard.

Animatic

Helped us visualise our storyboard as a film. Could cut shots to approx length and view in sequence. Could add music, effects and transitions. Meant more similarity between our storyboard and finished product as more visually compatible.

Blogger

Technology for

Construction

Final Cut for Ident

Final Cut for Ident

Photos taken of pens being moved by a fraction

Dragged to timeline and shortened

Run together to create stop motion ident

Last slide made longer to allow for name of production company to be read

Editing using Final Cut Express Raw footage ends here. Can always be returned to and difficult to delete permanently

Viewer – focus on individual highlighted clips

Canvas – whole sequence displayed here

Tool bar – basic tools for cutting, cropping, moving, adjusting volume etc Timeline – clips sequenced, trimmed and

assembled here

Control over view – size, audiowaves etc.

Control over layers – lock, turn off etc.

List of effects and transitions to choose from – used later in the editing process

Screen sizes can be changed depending what you are doing

Generally FCE is easy to learn and use.

Able to order our clips so we could focus on useful ones and leave the other takes to one side. Here we are building up

our edited sequence in layers

Here we have increased size of timeline and rolled out to a more detailed view – useful when fine editing for exact continuity.

Enables You to add sound and add effects to sound

Makes ordering of shots easier – can lock sound track so can match audio and video more easily

Easy to rearrange the sound levels and the time between each slide

Use of video filter to slightly desaturate image for memory effect.

Colour reduced without being made black and white

We picked out the memory flashes and added same effect on all

Use of fade out and in transition to show movement between scenes

Effect is dragged from the menu And added between the relevant clips

We added an echo sound effect to the memory sequences to ensure they felt less ‘real’ but also threatening

We were able to layer our sound, moving some of the ‘memory’ sound under the diegetic dialogue in the police scene

Disadvantages of Final Cut

• Rendering could take a long time

• Not possible to use at home without Apple Mac

• Exporting files time-consuming

• Easy to learn basics but more complex uses take time to work out

• Probably not industry standard like pro versions or Avid

Live Type Compatible with Final Cut – can export Final Cut film into it

Works in very similar way so easy to pick up

Text entered here And appears here

Live Type

Range of prepackaged effects and transititons to choose from

Timing and length of both text and effect can be altered

More complex fine editing of text e.g. shadow, timing, tracking etc.

Technology for Evaluation

Blogger:

Use of Blogger helped us see our progress and what work needed to be added.

Able to see who had done what pieces of work.

Knowing how many posts we had made kept us on top of our work.

ORGANIZING AND MANAGING OUR

WORK:

The ability to add images to texts made our work more interesting and readable – more like blogs in the real media world.

Able to label our work meant we could see who completed work and when they uploaded it.

ADDED TEXTS AND IMAGES:

Ability to see other groups progress.

Able to assess if we are behind on work.

Able to compare our work with others.

Gives us the opportunity to improve our work.

ABILITY TO VIEW COURSEWORK OF OTHERS:

Ability to add work to our blogs using hyperlinks to other websites.

We could present our work on slideshare and link it to our blog.

USE OF HYPERLINKS:

Able to comment on other groups work.

Give us criticisms and feedback of our work so we can improve.

We are able to express our ideas on other pieces to help other groups.

Gives us helpful and reassuring comments towards our work.

Anyone can look at our work and give feedback.

We can get comments from other groups.

ABILITY TO COMMENT:

This means anyone who has access to the internet can comment on our work, these comments are mainly supportive and beneficial but sometimes can be abusive and not serious.

A possible disadvantage of using blogger is anyone can see our work.

Blocking everyone except our class would mean we could be blocking people who have genuine and valid comments which could improve our coursework.

DISADVANTAGES OF BLOGGER AND AVALIBILITY TO EVERYONE:

Able to filter by name label.

Can see what members of the group have done what work. Makes it easy to

return to work we have done previously for ideas.

Makes it simple to access our own work.

USE OF LABEL FILTER:

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: POWERPOINT / SLIDESHARE

Powerpoint useful for group evaluation – easy for all to access and add to.

Useful for primarily visual presentation with brief comments – not for more sustained comments / evaluation

Shared on blog by uploading via slideshare and linking.

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: ANALYSIS OF IMAGES

More sustained critical analysis carried out through bullet point / image format

Easily created directly on blog

More individual format allowing for differences of opinion.

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: ILLUSTRATED PRESENTATIONJ

Group discussion as element of debate / argument to task about distribution. Filmed, exported, reformatted and uploaded to blog with ‘signposts’ to discussion added with LiveType text and images from Google image search. Helps a viewer skim through the discussion and stop when eye caught by a discussion topic.

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: ANNOTATED IMAGES

We evaluated target audience on Paint by creating text boxes around a picture of people we thought were typical of our target audience. We thought this helped to show that we were keeping this audience in mind through all the comments. We were able to divide our ideas on target audience into clear separate boxes / points.

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: CONTACT SHEETS

We decided to present our genre choices as a series of images. This is because most of the decisions we made that showed the genre we were working in were visual. We felt that by presenting a sequence of images like this, the ‘feel’ of our genre would be immediately obvious. We did add our own explanatory notes, but believe you could tell the genre of our film just be looking at these images.

MULTIMEDIA POTENTIAL: ANNOTATED FILM

This format helped us complete a task that could have become repetitive together (we would no doubt have used the same screenshots and had the same audience feedback to work from). Using LiveType as an annotation tool we were able to explain how we felt our sequence had worked to catch the attention of the audience we had identified – fans of the genre.