How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?
Throughout each of the stages technology has been vital. We have been able to communicate our ideas to our target audience and as a pair through the blog and also Twitter which we both have on easy access to - Bank on his Blackberry and me on my iPod Touch through smartphone applications. This has allowed us to constantly communicating and planning things like filming.
Blogger was the basis of our research stage because it acted as a board of all our ideas and sources of inspiration from which we could eliminate ideas that weren't as good as others. Our teachers could also keep up-to-date with where we were and give us feedback on our work. It also allowed Bank and me to share ideas. We were also able to do this with Twitter which we used rather than texting because it is free and as its on the internet it is possible to insert links and photos.
While planning filming and the filming trip we used technology constantly. We book the hotel and train tickets online which was very easy and quick. The Travelodge website was very user-friendly as it listed all the hotels in London, price and the distance from tube stations which allowed us to find a cheap hotel not too far from the centre of London. Booking the train tickets online made it cheaper than buying it on the day and allowed us to reserve seats. It was also less time consuming on the day of the travelling as we had only had to wait for them to print. While in London we used the Google Maps application on Bank's phone if we got lost. We also used a TubeMap application on my iPod Touch to chose our tube routes. This make getting round London easier and meant if we were to get lost we could easily find our way again. We also used the weather app. on my iPod to check the weather in the morning to dress appropriately. Throughout the trip Bank and I took photographs on the camera and on his Blackberry which we used as a behind the scenes video.
To film we used a FujiFilm SLR camera which had the option to shoot in HD this made our shots higher quality which we decided would make the video look more professional. However the HD clips were larger than shooting in the normal format so we had to invest in two memory cards to ensure we had enough space to shoot everything we needed both in London and filming in the country. We then used a memory card reader to put the footage on to the computer. This made the transfer a lot quicker than transferring the clips directly from the camera. Just in case we backed up all our work and all the footage on an external hard-drive and kept the clips on the memory card so we had two files if anything happened to either the hard-drive or the memory card.
For the draft we used Windows Movie Maker which we found out did not create a very effective video because of the amount of footage we had taken the program was struggling and ran very slowly. So for the final video we decided to use Adobe Premiere Elements on the school computers which are faster than our home computers/laptops. Premiere Elements gave us a lot more choice when it came to editing effects than Movie Maker so it was a much better program to use. However we had to convert our footage into MPEG files as the program could not read the MOV files. We used a video converter program to do this which created good quality files however it took a while to convert everything as we had a lot of footage. Once we had done this we had to program Premiere Elements to work from the external hard-drive which has more space than the school computers this made the program run a lot quicker and more effectively. In Premiere Elements we used the black & white effect, brightness increase, fading and ghosting to enhance our shots. We had not used Premiere Elements before so it took a while to get used to the program and figure out how to do things, however we soon picked it up and found that if we rendered the clips every few minutes it would run quicker. We saved regularly to back-up the video.
For my digipak and poster I used the same camera which creates high quality images which I then manipulated and enhanced in Adobe Photoshop Elements. After experimenting with the techniques in this program I was able to create the effect I wanted. I have used this program before so I was confident using it and found it easy to use. I also used Illustrator program to create my record company logo. I drew a picture which I then imported and edited it to attach it to text. I had not used this before so it took a while to understand and create an effective outcome.
We used technology throughout every stage and it would not be possible to have done anything without it. However we could have been more efficient if we had understood the technology better, for example when first starting to use Premiere Elements if we had known it was problems with the drive space rather than the files then we could have saved time by starting out with using the program off the external hard-drive.
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