Evaluation, Question 4 Marcus Stanley How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

DocumentaryObviously, we had to collect plenty of information through research so that as a group we could comprehend and understand how to put this piece together sufficiently as well as have the required knowledge to not only make our documentary realistic, but also informative for our audience. It was evident that the internet would be our main source for research as we took advantage of such sites as Google and BBC Sport to find facts and stats concerned with technology in sport. We felt using professional sites such as BBC Sport would be essential in our research as the content they offer is reliable. Through Google, we were able to discover that BBC One was the most viewed television channel in the UK, which lead us to choose this as the channel we were to air our documentary on as it would be available to most people in the UK.

We also found YouTube to be very beneficial to us in the research of our documentary as it allowed us to view such related documentaries as "Ronaldo - Tested To The Limit" in which various sports scientists try to discover the secrets behind the Portuguese footballer's amazing talent through putting him through various tests and activities. Viewing such documentaries aided us enormously as it allowed us to understand the codes and conventions of documentaries. I also used Netflix to view another documentary; Morgan Spurlock's 'Supersize Me' in which the American eats only food from McDonald's for a whole month to demonstrate fast food's effect on American people. Without the use of the internet, viewing such documentaries and gaining facts and stats would have been a lot more difficult to gather. We used basic tools such as A3 paper and pens to draw up ideas of topics through designing spider-diagrams.

Construction (Filming)Constructing our documentary was divided into two tasks; that being editing and of course filming. To film our documentary we used a Canon HG20 HD which enable to film our content in high definition, which is high quality in resolution. To go along with the camera, we used a tripod to support the camera and enable us to create still footage, allowing for our expert interviews to look even more authentic as opposed to having shaky footage and making our documentary completely unprofessional.We also used a shotgun microphone to help reduce background noise whilst we were filming our expert interviews and vox pop footage and used Sennheiser HD201 headphones to listen intently to what footage we were recording live to help us test the quality of the sound at the time. This allowed us to adapt to any background noise and prevent it. For recording our voiceoveSE2000 Condenser microphone with a pop shield. This allowed us to create a narration of high quality.

Construction (Editing)After the completion of filming, we then edited our footage into what would be our final documentary. We did so using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. This was a fantastic and simple editing software and really made the editing experience very simple once we got used to its functions.

We again used YouTube to find various archival footage that we felt was relevant to our topic, notably American runner Michael Johnson's olympic gold medal winning race in the 1996 Atlanta games.

Magazine Double Page SpreadResearchPersonally, I only researched one magazine double page spread in preparation for the creation and design of our own. This is because our collective knowledge of the codes and conventions of double page spreads was already sufficient enough to create our own immediately. The double page spread we did research and analyse is pictured below. Analysis of this double page spread allowed me to include various codes and conventions such as columns and a main image into our own double page spread.

ConstructionI create our magazine double page spread we used Adobe InDesign CS3. We implemented the screen shots of our documentary into our DPS as well as adding our article text and separating it into 3 columns to add realism. We added our background image for the text to stand out on and created links and page numbers easily.

Radio TrailerResearch and Planning For our research we listened to a few different radio trailers on YouTube and from our college archive on the Apple iMac computers. We also used Google again to research the common codes and conventions that are known to be included in other radio trailers. Most radio trailers last for around 30-40 seconds, according to our research. We agreed that we could only use small excerpts from our documentary as audio files to include in our radio trailer. This made our script a lot easier to produce as we understood that didn't need a lot of material to record.

ConstructionAgain, like in our documentary making, we used a shotgun microphone to help reduce background noise whilst we were recording our voiceover for the radio trailer. We used the same headphones to listen to what we had created and to check if it was good enough to be included in the final piece. the quality of the sound at the time. This allowed us to adapt to any background noise and prevent it. We used GarageBand to create our radio trailer. We found this software easy to use and therefore we were comfortable in creating a sufficient radio trailer to promote our documentary. We exported the saved voiceover audio on to the iMac and imported them into GarageBand, as well as our background music and excerpts from our documentary.

Other media technologies...To present all of our work this term, we have used Blogger. It is a free Blog website that has allowed us to showcase our journey throughout the Media Studies course and has been simple to use. We have uploaded all of our research and planning, and have also used other websites to present our work on to be placed onto the blog. Notably, Scribd, Prezi and Slideshare have been predominantly utilised by our group.