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

Technology has enabled me to create 3 pieces of advertising media text that I am happy with. I have learnt a lot from these technologies and without them, I wouldn’t have been able to create any where near as good texts. During my research and planning, I used the internet a lot to get audience feedback (through my blog on blogspot.com) and to research teaser trailers, film posters and websites that already exist from a romance genre film. I also used word a lot to create questionnaires to hand out to people for research. I also used ‘Windows Excel’ to create graphs for my analysis of this research. These programmes have helped me to clearly understand my research and for there not to be huge amount of writing for me to read when making decisions because I can look at the graphs which is quicker for me to find answers to what my target audience have made. In other words, it has enables me to visually interpret and resent my findings. I also used ‘Powerpoint’ when creating my presentations to show to my classmates and focus groups for audience feedback. This was really useful as I am extremely familiar with ‘Powerpoint’ and I didn’t have any problems when creating my presentations. To create our teaser trailer, we used a JVC camera and in places, a tripod to make sure each shot was steady where we wanted it to be. After shooting our footage we uploaded it onto a CD and then to the computer. We had some difficulties changing the format of the clips as the editing programme we used wouldn’t recognise the clips in the format they came in. However we managed to figure this out then we could move onto editing! We used Windows Movie Maker as our editing programme but this restricted what we could do and we were made to use some editing stiles that we weren’t really pleased with (like a wipe cut) and didn’t think looked professional because they aren’t the typical edits uses in romance teaser trailers and it also makes it look ‘cartoony’ and childish. However, we had to add different edits in to show a range of different ones so it makes the trailer a bit more interesting that if we had just used straight cuts. I feel that if we had had more time then we could have done more research into editing programmes and downloaded and learnt how to use a better one before editing. However we learnt a lot from Windows Movie Maker and we are happy with our final result. I used a Nikon camera when taking my images for my poster and website. I wanted a professional camera so my pictures were good quality and made the media text look more professional. When editing these pictures I used Photo Shop because I had previously learnt how to use this when doing my AS coursework and I found the results were pleasing. I changed the saturation and brightness to make some of the images black and white. To merge the two images for my poster, I used the ‘blur tool’ so the line wasn’t so harsh which made the images look like one instead of two images put together. I also used the ‘colour tool’ to fix some of the blemishes so the faces looked more 3D and professional. I also changed the contrast as the lighting was different when I took each image so I knew that changing the contrast would help make the two images look like one when they were joined together. This was difficult to remove and I feel that if I new more about editing images then I would have been able to do a better job. However, I am really pleased with how much I have learnt from using Photo Shop for editing my images.