EVALUATION OF USE OFDIGITAL TECHNOLGY

USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY FORRESEARCH

Internet based research• The advantages to internet based research are:• Secondary research other people have collected• In depth and detailed information• There is a great variety of research available• Provides you an advantage in respect to time, amount of information,

access, organisation and instant information• The disadvantages of internet based research are:• Many internet sources are unreliable and aren't factual. • A lot of information is recycled online• Websites such as Wikipedia can be changed by anyone • It can be hard to find information specific to what you need

Google

Google – advantages: offers a good variety of information sources and different websites, you can get good information within seconds, free, fast and easy, disadvantages: may not have information specific to what you need, information changes so you may not be able to find information you have previously used. There are so many websites, hard to find the right one

Wikipedia – availability of information

Search bar that enables you to get information quickly and easily

Anyone can make their own account and publish information

Can refine your search and click on different subjects

There’s a wide variety of different languages

Wikipedia – advantages: huge variety of information, can find out information about anything. Good to check and compare with other websites. Quick, useful –disadvantages : anyone can edit it, so therefore the information may not be accurate, may not always be relevant to you, not easily understandable for younger people.

Wiki Answers

Search bar, able to get an answer to anything

Wiki answers – advantages: can ask any question and will get a response, there are answers for most questions you need. You get more than one answer and piece of information. Disadvantages – unreliable, general public giving answers, may not be a correct answer.

Can easily click on categories to refine your search

Can sign up and become a member to ask a answer questions

YouTube There’s a search bar for you to type in what you’d like to watch

If you have an account, it will suggest videos for you

There’s filters to refine your research

Anyone can sign up and have an account. Enables you to comment on other people’s videos

YouYube – advantages: wide variety of video responses, tutorials and information shown, quick streaming, quick and easy. Disadvantages: not always useful or correct. Comments may not be useful and can be harsh

Dangers of Search Engines

• The information can be quite similar on many different websites which can make finding different, varied information quite difficult.

• Sometimes, you need specific information however the information available is not quite refined enough for you.

A lot of people don’t go further than the first page so many students could get the same information. If you want pictures of specific things, it is often hard and irrelevant pictures come up.

BFI Statistical Year Book

Valuable source of facts and figures available to all online.

SUMMARY - RESEARCH

Digital technology is vital in our research.

Without it we could not have looked at film openings, stills from films, lighting etc. We would have had to watch films by DVD or in the cinema – expensive and time-consuming ways of carrying out research.

USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY FORPLANNING

Cameras

• For our planning of where we would film, we took photographs with a Nikon digital camera

• For practising our final sequence we used a Canon video camera

Blogger

• To show our research and planning for our opening sequence, we published it on to blogger which is a free weblog which is linked with Google it enables you to upload text, pictures and videos.

Blogger- Video

• We were filmed presenting the first draft of our mind map, we uploaded this to blogger and watched back to see what we could add and change.

• We finalised our storyboard and and then filmed an animatic of it and uploaded it to blogger and was able to see what our opening sequence would be like.

Blogger - Photographs

• We were able to upload photographs and this was good as visual evidence was some of the most useful for our planning.

• The negative about uploading photographs was the fact you weren’t able to copy and paste them, you had to save them to the desktop and then download them onto blogger which was time consuming.

Blogger - Layout

• It enables you to see each other’s work which helped us share our info and Ideas if someone was stuck.

Name Filters

• Also had label filters of our names which helped us find our work easily as we have the same titles as each other.

Ordering of Work

• All the work is laid out in chronological order, so it is easy to find your work which may have been posted recently or in the past

SUMMARY - PLANNING

• We needed digital cameras for all aspects of our planning as these were the tools we would use in the actual construction.

• Blogger was a vital digital hosting site as it enabled us to keep all our research and planning activities in a shared space which we could interact with as a group. This significantly eased the difficulties of working in a group of 4.

USE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY FOR CONSTRUCTION

Final Cut Express

Final Cut Express allowed us to edit our footage.

It is a digital editing package that enabled us to achieve professional editing for our opening sequence.

Final Cut ExpressWe could view our opening sequence from here.

These were the tools we used to cut out footage as well as zooming into out shots so we could make the continuity more accurate.

Here, we could arrange our shots into the order we wanted them to appear. It allowed us to cross-cut between our characters as well as control our sound.

This is where our footage, music, ident and credits appeared. It meant we could drag it onto our timeline and edit it into our opening sequence.

Sound• When finding a soundtrack we used

the site free play music which gave us access to a huge range of royalty free tracks.

• We entered key words such as ‘fast paced’ or ‘action’ to narrow down our search and eventually after listening to various tracks we selected ‘superspy’.

• We had to edit the volume levels on the final piece as come sound was drowned out by the music we had added. This was just a simple click and drag process.

Manipulation of Sound

• We also had to enhance sound on our final piece. We did this on parts where Shannon is typing or when someone is talking. We had to play around with this to make sure people could be heard over the music, but the volume was not so loud that it was blaring.

• Some parts we filmed had not captured the voice as it was too quiet even when enhanced. These parts needed to be recorded after the original two days of filming.

Effects and TransitionsTransitions

• cross fade – we used a cross fade transition when it came to sound, specifically the music we added. This allowed us to merge the same track twice without it sounding like we were repeating the track.

• fade in dissolve – after our ident was shown we faded in to the opening sequence. This is a smooth transition that makes crossing in to the next scene soft, not sharp or hard. We used it at the end of our sequence to fade in to the title as well.

• fade out dissolve – we faded out our ident once it had been shown, this allowed a smooth transition in to the next scene. We also used this transition when the piece ended to fade in to our title card and again to fade out from the title.

Effects and Transitions

Effects• We did not use any effects like filters or

enhancements to the picture however we did use LiveType to add an effect to the text of our title.

Live Type

Live Type was the software that we used to create our credits.

Live TypeFrom here we could decide what font or animation we wanted to use for our credits.

This was where we entered what we wanted our credits to say as well as editing the size, speed of animation and colour.

This is where we cut or changed intervals of when the credits would come in. It allowed us to organise all the credits.

Moving our credits around the screen was done from here . It also allowed us to see our credits in the format that they would appear.

Photoshop• We used Photoshop in

order to create our ident.

• It allowed us to combine all the pictures and text into a movement and a picture that would work as Rainstorms ident.

• We layered pictures over each other so it would create an overall image.

Ident

Those layers were then imported into Final Cut Express and edited there using the motion path tool.

Photoshop

We also used Photoshop to create the CCTV footage by adding a white frame and a record effect.

SUMMARY - CONSTRUCTION

• Digital software editing packages enabled us to create work that looked professional.

• We were able to use these packages quite quickly with a little tuition.

• Without these packages, we would not have been able to create our coursework at all.

• We were also able to combine work from these packages to create effects.

USE OF TECHNOLOGY FOREVALUATION

Many of the comments made about the use of Blogger for research and planning also apply here and won’t be repeated.

Evaluating Work

• Throughout the coursework we have evaluated our own work to show how we have improved and what has changed. This research has helped us to adapt our final piece effectively to make it flow smoothly and look good.

Comments Feature

• Because the blog is open to the public we are open to criticism and praise from anyone. This is helpful as we get a non biased opinion on our work and can see what people really think about what we’ve produced. This is important as the feedback we get from our teacher may not be enough help as they have seen our course work step by step, so know what it’s about. Someone who has not seen the work before can then write if it’s clear what genre it is in.

Audience Feedback

Using the comments function allowed us to get extremely useful feedback from another school.

This was a good example of the reach of the blog.

Microsoft Word• This allowed us to

create our mind maps on target audience

• It allowed us to separate our points so we could explain more clearly as well as allowing us to combine text and images together which we could then screenshot and add to our blog.

Image Combination on Photoshop• We combined stills

from our opening sequence in order to evaluate how we used camera angles and mise-en-scène in order to apply to our chosen genre.

• We could then talk about the techniques we used on Blogger as part of our evaluation.

PowerPoint• We used PowerPoint for our

evaluation of digital technology that we used during the making of our opening sequence. This was useful as we could use small points and present our techniques in a different way.

• We separated or PowerPoint into four sections. They were planning, research, construction and evaluation.

Formatting on Blogger

• Blogger allows us to upload pictures like screenshots of coursework to the blog along with text and other formatting means. This is helpful as we can visually see changes/improvements to our work. It also acts as evidence that we have researched and evaluated our own work.

Overall Advantages of Blogger

• We can see the progress we have made as a group.• We can upload content from any computer meaning

work can be done from virtually anywhere.• Comments from the general public can be written on

our posts which is useful when we evaluate our work.

• Comments are unbiased so we know they are going to be helpful.

• We can post in a variety of formats such as pictures, text, PowerPoint and video.

SUMMARY - EVALUATION

• We used different kinds of digital technology to present our evaluations.

• These helped us work effectively as a group and created our evaluations as media products in their own right.

• Blogger is a vital tool for making our evaluations accessible to all.