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

I used multiple different pieces of software and online programs to create and research my products. I have used Photoshop Cs5 for creation of my poster and my magazine covers I am very familiar with this particular piece of software, and this familiarity allowed me to create these pieces of work easily within a small amount of time, but it still worked out well. I used multiple tools to make my work look more professional, I used background textures by adding an overlay option and a soft rubber to create smooth looking transition between the photo colours and the background. Photoshop is a program that I use in my spare time; I have it on my laptop so it allowed me to complete tasks outside of college which gives me more time to make improvements to my work.

    To research my target audience to find what they like in horror films and trailers we constructed a questionnaire which was handed out to students in our class and friends around the college in paper form. We also linked the questionnaire page on our Facebook profiles and got a few responses from our friends directly through surveymonkey.com. This site was very helpful not only in the production of the questionnaire but also with the collection of results. The only problem that this website had was that you could only create a questionnaire that was 10 questions long unless you became a premium member, this meant that we were limited in questions but it also made us think about what questions would be more effective and useful.

   In order to make our trailer as real and professional as possible we had to research trailers for other horror films, to watch the horror trailers we used a very popular website called YouTube, on this website you can view online videos that people have uploaded so it gave us a huge amount of horror trailers that we could gather ideas from to make our trailer better.

    For the creation of the trailer we used a program call final cut pro, this is reasonably easy piece of software to learn although it did crash a few times which was extremely annoyingl. I liked the way the application allowed you to change the layout because it helped us to view the trailer easier so we could find problems and sort them out. Final cut pro gave us a huge range of tools that were very helpful in the creation of our trailer, these tools helped us edit music files to time certain parts with shot transitions, they allowed us to organise our timeline so that we wouldn’t get lost in our own work. I think of all the tools we used the razor tool was most useful, this allowed us to split up our audio and our shots so that we could make the entire product look more professional by switching between split up parts of one shot (the ghost stepping towards the camera in the garden) and other shots that were taken. The razor tool allowed us to easily create and organise shots that would be used in a professional horror trailer. The timeline on Final cut pro is also a very clever piece of technology, what I found to be very helpful was the amount of layers that were available; this allowed us to greatly increase the professional quality of the audio. By having more layers we could add more audio, and stack tracks onto others, this way we could basically make the audio exactly the way we wanted it.

   Throughout both years of this course we have been using Flickr, this is a very useful website that allows you to upload and manage pictures. I found this specifically helpful because I liked the way that you could add tags onto pictures because it was very easy compared to loading a picture into Microsoft word and drawing arrows everywhere. It is very easy to apply these pictures to blogger, although website links are not the most attractive and colourful things to add to your blog.

    For filming the shots in the trailer we used cameras that were supplied by the college, in my opinion these cameras were very good for what we were doing, they were light, easy to use with computers and management of shots that were taken and it was easy to fix them to the tripods. The overall quality of the shots that were taken were very high although it would have been better if they had a night-vision mode because those kind of shots would have scared people more and they are often used in modern horror films.

    Blogger is the main underlying piece of technology that we have been using throughout the whole of media in college. At first I didn’t like the idea because it was a new piece of technology that I couldn’t be bothered to learn, I didn’t like the old layout, it wasn’t modern at all, simply looking at the pages on the website put me off. However I did like how you could manage your work easily allowing yourself to do what parts of the work you wanted as drafts and then finish it, it made me feel like I had more time to do it. I have had a few problems uploading images which is extremely irritating which is why I like to use Flickr. Recently they have brought out a new version of blogger which is easier to use in my opinion, it fixes the problem with how it looks which made me feel better about using it. I think that I did hate it when we first started using it but then I began to like the ease of management, how many tools it gave you to edit your work and make it more interesting than just a simple block of text and eventually I did like the new layout of the website.