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

By Lucy Emily Taylor

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Media technologies have been the framework of our production. We have used media technologies to construct our project. Without these it wouldn’t have been possible to produce and create our project. With the internet being the biggest source of information we were able to access the tools we needed to help create a firm strong film idea. YouTube acts as a universal connection to see things from all over the world, enabling us to view other short films for inspiration. YouTube was also the source behind our film idea as we came across the short film ‘Love Language’, which was also created by a group of students similar to our age.

 

Before starting our project we came up with some quick questions that we could ask the public which we filmed live and created a video questionnaire. We filmed this using HDV - 1000 video recorder and edited the clips together

using Final Cut Pro. We recorded all of our findings in a shared group blog on ‘blogger’. This not only acted as somewhere to store and expand our ideas but helped us to communicate as a group; along with new media

technologies such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ which helped us to form group tasks so we were always sure on time for meeting and locations.

We also used Facebook as a source of distributing our questionnaires as we posted it on each of our Facebook’s so we could get as much

audience response as possible. We made our questionnaires on ‘Google Forms’ which made the standard a lot higher as I remember last year recording the publics responses on paper and then typing them up.

Using ‘Google Forms’ also helped for safe keeping!

When researching into similar films we used sites such as IMDB (Internet movie data base) to find out more information about film genres and other specific details about the films such as actors, directors etc. We used the BBFC (British board film classification), which holds all the information you need to know about giving your film the right certificate, which is something imperative to anyone making a film. The BBFC helped us to give our film a ‘U’ certificate which means it’s suitable for all.

After prepping everything using all of the above media technologies we then began filming our production. I had already used equipment in my first year such as the HDV-1000 camera and the Flash Zoom Recorder, this made things a lot easier when filming this year as I didn’t need to spend anytime familiarising myself with any of the equipment. For the opening sequence of our film we used the zoom recorder to record the voice over. Using the zoom recorder instead of recording on the normal camera helped us to create a sharp clear voice over that was of a high quality.

We then uploaded the voice over separately and edited it to the footage using Final Cut Express. We also used a zoom recorder when creating our radio trailer as we knew we’d get the best quality sound and knowing that we have to sell our film using the preproduction sources such as our movie poster and radio trailer, we knew it had to be of a professional high quality standard.

Film posters are one of the main ways you see a film advertised today. We wanted to make a unique poster that wouldn’t reveal too much of our story but still grabbed interest of the public. When researching other film posters along the same genre we found that they were quite simple. Keeping this in mind we decided to take photos of Loren in which we used a Canon 450D. We then uploaded the photo onto Photoshop Adobe and began creating our movie poster for ‘Like, Share, Follow’.

We had a few technical errors when recording which is to be expected when you’re spending a lot of your time using equipment you don’t necessarily use every day. One of the days we were filming, we’d already collected 2 hours worth of footage and we’d just got round to our final scene when the focus went on the camera, luckily after playing around with it we got the focus back. One of the main problems we came across when editing our film was finding some appropriate non-diegetic music to go over the top of our film that wasn’t trademarked. We didn’t think it would be a huge problem till researching our ideas and discovering that almost everything on the internet is copyright. Through the use of YouTube we came across a boy who had created his own music so I wrote to him on twitter and asked if we could use his song over our short film.

This is a clip taken from the footage when the camera lost focus

Using digital technologies in both my first and second year have really helped me to work independently on my project this year. Without the use of the media technologies I have used in my final year, it wouldn’t have been possible to achieve my final piece, ‘Like, Share, Follow’. My skills using the equipment and internet have grown even more during my time this year but I have also learned new things that I didn’t touch on in my first year such as some of the editing we applied to our film. As Loren is a blogger we wanted to make her video look ‘home made’ so we used an effect which made the video look like a home video. We also added the ‘bad TV’ effect which made the sound also like a home video with the crackle effect. Using the skills I have learnt over the past two years I am confident my short film has been pushed using my knowledge of the subject and I have worked to the best of my ability.