Evaluate what you have learned about media technologies through the process

Research

Jigsaw Productions

Internet-Based Research

Search Engines • Well-known e.g. Google. Offer a wide variety of

information sources, which then allows you a wide

choice of which source to use.

• Able to refine search to find exactly what you want

• Easy to use – choice of text, image, country etc

• Provides links to other information.

Availability of Information

• Able to get masses of information from different sources – Wikipedia, IMDb and Magazine Websites

•

Able to find out information easily- found the profit statistics for our genre, which gave us an idea of

what distribution company to use.

Availability of Information

Availability of Information

Disadvantages: Irrelevant information came up, or hoax videos

Able to research successful films within our genre

Watched openings on YouTube – were able to watch the opening 2 minutes of different chick flicks repeatedly to get ideas for how our opening should go.

People are most likely to click on results on the first page – made our research easier in a sense as we all agreed and had found similar things but fear that other AS students will have exactly same info

Many of the popular sites, like ‘Wikipedia’ and ‘IMDb’ had similar information – quite hard to find real range.

Danger of Repetition

Choosing Music

• Advantages:

• Lots of types of music

• Search box and tabs to narrow our results

• Website was easy to use

•Disadvantages: •Perhaps too much choice •Lots of the songs were quite similar to each other •Put under wrong sub headings/genres

•We decided to use Free Music Archive, after looking at a number of copyright free music sites.

Planning

Camera (Nikon)

• Able to take pictures of storyboard to transfer to Final Cut Express – easier than redrawing and HD card made transfer easy.

Canon Cameras

• The canon cameras were very easy to use and were a flexible tool used throughout our filming.

• They worked with tripods and handheld and were easy to learn how to use.

• Good quality film – mini Dv tapes still arguably give better quality than cards as less compression.

• Easy to handle. • BUT capture is in real time

so slower than card transfer.

Storyboarding Creating this storyboard on Final Cut Express- could export for iphone for filming – much more practical than paper copies Don’t need to re-draw

shots to re-order

Able to cut shots to approximate length and see timing of our opening. Also more sense of how whole piece looks than paper storyboard.

Presenting Research and Planning

Blogger

• Blogger has been extremely vital and useful during the process of our film production.

• It has shown the stages of the development of our 2 minute extract in chronological order and in an organised manner this has helped throughout our production.

Ability to Share Info / Ideas Able to see each other’s work at all times

Using central hub meant could see work of other groups too

Ordering Work Stored in chronological order with helpful post titles. Makes progress of work easy to track and easy to find past posts for reference. Possible to link posts if preferred.

Name labels helps filter work and concentrate on an individual

Use of Label Filter

• Able to filter name label.

• Able to quickly identify whose work has been put on as well as your own.

Use of Images

• Images are easy to import into blogger and they are size adjustable.

• Photos can be loaded on the blog with annotations.

• Comments can be added and allow us to compare with other work.

Construction

Final Cut Express

We were able to add non-diegetic sound to our film.

We could import lots of different clips to our project as and when we filmed.

We put our clips on timeline to cut and edit them to the way we wanted.

Basic Editing

We were able to create different video and audio layers. This was helpful because it allowed us to add split screen, text and a background for one single shot. Useful to be able to lock layers when working with other layers

Use of Layers

Creation of Ident

We created a series of images on Photoshop adding in an taking out letters. We imported the images to Final Cut, reduced them to minimum length and ran together for animated ident. Added music beneath for final effect.

Adding Effects and Transitions

Able to add pre-packaged effects and transitions from software: Cross-fade transition to show passing of time Page curl transition to give photo album effect

Advantages of Final Cut Express

• We were able to use it to put the film together exactly how we wanted.

• We could easily undo anything that we did not like – no permanent changes ever made.

• We could easily watch back the progress made looking at previous versions of work.

Disadvantages of Final Cut Express

• It took a while to get to used to.

• We had to ask how to do things quite a lot.

• Fairly time consuming as we didn’t know how to do things.

• Sometime didn’t import things properly which stalled us carrying on.

• Rendering and exporting times sometimes slow.

• Needed constant backing up as used on stand alone machines

Live Type

Use of LiveType

• We used Live Type to add font onto our film.

• It allowed us to choose the font that we wanted and also the colour.

• It also let us choose what effect we wanted the text to have.

This allowed us to have an effect for the text’s entrance and adjust its timing. We could choose the colour.

We were able to select the most suitable font.

Advantages of LiveType

• We were able to test lots of fonts to find the one that suited our film.

• It has many effects to make the text better.

• Using this software we could create our ident for the beginning of our film which turned out really successful.

Disadvantages of using LiveType

• We found this software really difficult to get used to.

• It was really time consuming.

• Sometime we were unable to get the letters to how we wanted.

• We also sometime found it hard to import it into Final Cut Express, to where we needed it.

Evaluation

Blogger

We are using blogger to present our experience and the development of our 2 minute sequence. We are also using it to present our evaluation. The main advantage is that the research and planning, already presented on blogger, and the evaluation are linked. Makes it clear that we are still researching and planning now, and that we have been evaluating from the beginning – not separate stages.

Evaluation of Work in Progress

• Evaluation process is taking place throughout the course of our blogging and filming not just at the end.

Comment Function

• This allows chosen people to give extra feedback about our sequence and work in progress.

• Any person from the public can comment and give us feedback.

Advantages of this

• Our work is on the internet for the world to see meaning feedback can be given at any time.

• We get un-biased comments and feedback from people other than ones within our group.

• Probably the most useful tool for helping us evaluate – outside opinions needed at times.

Variety of Formats

We wrote about representation on the blog because it was the most complex argument of the representation tasks and therefore needed more words.

Being able to combine with images helped us to illustrate our points.

PowerPoint

We used PowerPoint uploaded to slideshare for this presentation because it can be explained visually and with few words.

This was also a good format for a group presentation because we could all add individual slides and merge them, then go back and correct / edit other group member’s slides.

Mixed Media Presentations

This shows us creating the captions to add to the filmed presentation on distribution choices. This was a topic where there were lots of pros and cons so a discussion seemed a good presentational method. However, for people who do not have 7 minutes or so, the bullet points can create an option of identifying the point being discussed and just watching one or two small sections.

Mixed Media Presentations

Using LiveType to Comment on how we have (hopefully) appealed to the audience was an easy format to show what we thought and was also another good way of working effectively in a group as we were all able to add notes and adjust each other’s comments.