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

The internet gave access to a full range of short films that are not produced in the mainstream media. This was thanks to websites such as You Tube and i-player. This provided us with the unique opportunity to draw inspiration from numerous sources and a wide range of short films - without the internet this would have been technically impossible. The amount of short films on You Tube is immense and they vary hugely, meaning that we were never short of inspiration if we needed it.  We could gain a lot of information from researching things like the genres and themes among others. Going to libraries and buying magazines and then analysing them for the required info would be unpractical due to time and financial constraints. The internet was especially useful in terms of researching our poster as we had access to a large amount of examples that could be easily found and used.

The blog was really helpful to us as we could document every stage of our research and planning and whenever we needed to, we could go back to it. In addition we could add in different multimedia such as videos and pictures in order to enhance our research and planning. This is also useful as it helps in organising and presenting research in a form that helps in gaining feedback from my partner in the group.

DV cameras had a very grainy image and although this was very effective for the urban/ block scenes, we might have used a more glossy, bright and happy image for the romantic scenes but with the cameras that we had this was impossible to achieve. When we were producing our film we had quite considerable limitations, especially in terms of equipment and low quality. Its main advantage was that it was very affordable. In terms of sound recording, we had to rely on voice-overs as it was unpractical to record sound on open set when we had insufficient equipment.

The digital camera provided us with pictures of good quality which was important as the picture is the focal point of the poster. We didn't have to rely on the digital camera too much as we only needed pictures for our poster as our magazine only utilised screenshots from our short film. An advantage of using the cameras was that we had instant access to photos and we could put it on the computer quickly. While we were taking the photos we had the ability to see whether their quality was sufficient as they were displayed on the digital screen. These is considerably superior to film cameras that would be unpractical to use, when creating the poster.

Using the software 'i-movie HD' to edit our film provided us with numerous advantages. The fact that it is a non-linear editing software allowed us to experiment with ideas easily and it meant that if we made a mistake, it was easy to fix it. As it is free and made for amateur filmmakers it was really easy to use as we didn't have problems with our time and financial constraints. However, we were constrained by the lack of features on i-movie, especially in terms of things like titles, "split screen" etc.

To produce our poster we used Photoshop CS4, an industry standard program. This proved to be both an advantage and a nuisance, due to the fact it was time consuming because of its in-depth features but advantageous because of the choice that we were provided with, which in turn allowed us to experiment with different ideas. Photoshop also allowed laying of images and image manipulation, which was really helpful in making our poster a good one. 

Pages is a desktop publisher that is not of industry standard but that's an advantage as it is really easy to use and there weren't any missing features that we needed to finish our magazine. This meant that Pages was sufficient for our needs and we managed to produce an effective magazine.

Internet was useful in the post-production stage as we were able to get copyright free music which would otherwise be near to impossible to achieve.  Sound effects were easy to get as when we needed them we simply went to a website that had copyright free music on it.

When creating our blogging evaluation, the internet was really helpful as we could compile all our data in one place, we could place a large number of different multimedia in order to enrich our evaluation. We were able to get feedback through things like Facebook. We were able to get images from the internet that proved to be useful in all parts of our evaluation.

We were able to upload our movie on You Tube which gave us quite a lot of audience feedback. Additionally uploading our pod-cast, director's commentary and practice shoot would have been impossible without You Tube. This allowed us to reach a wider audience which then gave us a bigger amount of feedback.

I-movie was helpful in our evaluation as without it we would have been unable to include so many different types of images and footage. We could play with the sound and make it coherent due to the fact that I-movie is a non-linear editing software.