4) How did you use media technologies in the construction,

research, planning and evaluation stages?

The production of all three of our media products meant for the use of a variety of technology. We began with the planning of our products whereby we used technology which we were all familiar with. This included analysising tv documentaries through Iplayer and youtube.

We then used blogger.com to upload all our research and planning, this helped us organise the research and see who needed to do what, or what was missing in what areas. Most of our research and planning area involved us spiltting up and completing different sections. Blogger.com also enabled us to scan in any hand written research we had done, for instance our initial ideas sheet. This made planning easier for us as if we weren’t able to access a computer for any reason we knew that any work we did on paper could be easily transferred onto the blog through the simple scanning system which is in place within the college. I found blogger.com overall a really useful and simple site to use, allowing is to easily upload work without any instruction needed. We began our planning by simply brainstorming ideas on what we wanted our documentary to be about, we wanted to explore a topic which we were all interested in, this didn’t require any use of technology.

Once we had decided on the documentary idea, we did further research into the topic, including further analyse of documentaries related to the topic we had chosen, research on news reports and facts and statistics into those who use social networking sites and relevant crimes.

Further research we did involving the computer was our target audience, who do we actually want our product to be aimed at? We needed to establish a target audience in order to establish what research to do because we needed to know what would appeal to our target audience. We knew an essential area of research was to explore the TV and radio channels we were going to broadcast our documentary and radio trailer on, as well as which magazine to publish our article. In order to do this we firstly produced a questionnaire asking our target audience what channel they would mostly watch, we had a good deal of debate on which channel to broadcast our documentary, originally through audience and research I undertook, we agreed BBC1 would be the best channel as this is the channel that attracts our target audience the most and airs similar documentary programmes. However we ended up broadcasting on bbc2 as it fits with the age range of our target audience more appropriately. Our documentary falls into the style of public affairs. These tend to be shown by public service broadcasting channels such as BBC and explore current controversial affairs, in particular they draw attention to a perceived and can have a significant impact on the audience. This is relevant to our documentary as we are exploring idea of social networking and the riots, a perceived wrong and current affair which got the country talking during the summer months.

The audience research we produced involved the use of excel so that we could produce graphs to make our data more visually appealing, and word to actually produce our questionnaire. This was software we were all familiar with, so had no real difficulty here.

Once most of the planning stage had been done, we noticed that the blog looked unorganised so an easy way to resolve this was through the use of new technology known as slide share and scribd. None of us had used either of these before so it was challenging and took us a while to familiarise ourselves with the software. However, we did manage to establish how to use scribd so used this in situations whereby we had a lot of scanned in paper, so for example the story board. It just made the blog look a lot neater and professional so overall was a useful piece of software which allowed us to keep everything in one place and develop our IT skills even further.

Example of the use of scribd within our blog.

The equipment which was required to film our documentary was at first challenging, we made a lot of mistakes to begin with therefore meaning we had to redo various vox pops as the sound quality was not perfect. However, with practice the use of the technology became easier.

The camcorders we used were cannon h920 which had a variety of different features which helped us record our footage to the best standard possible. We were introduce to all the features of a camera by a member of staff before the production process took place. After a just a brief period of using the camcorder, we were able to establish some of its features without referring to any help guides. Its zoom button was placed at the top of the camera, its smooth zoom control meant that we were able to make the zoom effect look as professional as possible in situations we considered appropriate, for example, we zoomed in on the Solihull sixth form sign as part of the establishing shot to the college. We also had the option the take skill images, this is a useful feature, which when reflecting back on our production and construction process I wish we used more as it would of produced better quality, high resolution images as opposed to taking stills of the time line which turned out to be very pixelated.

Once all the initial research had been undertook on software which we were familiar with, we were then introduced with the technology we would be using for the actual construction of the documentary. This included camcorder, tripod, headphones, and directional mics.

Through the use of the function button we had various filming modes which we were allowed to select along with other options such as shooting modes, white balance and image and digital effects. We didn’t use any of the effects available on the camera as there was not a high enough range of possible effects which we believed to be satisfactory compared to what was available within final cut. This meant that the post production stage would take longer, however, in the long run it would be worth it to ensure the documentary looked as professional as possible.A convention on the camera which came in useful was the light settings including white balance, this meant that we could set the camera appropriately so that clips did not turn out to look orange or blue.The use of tripods allowed us to make our recording portable, it also reduced the effect of shaking camera which immediately suggests an amateur project. Similarly with the mics, they allowed for the sound levels to be as clear as possible to again reduce the idea of an amateur project.

I overall found the cannon camcorder, as well as all the other recording equipment reasonably easy to operate. The camcorder sufficiently fulfilled my expectations and allowed for the production of well exposed high resolution recordings. As well as the actual recording, the camcorders were on hard discs. This enabled us to simply export all footage from the camcorder straight onto the mac. This was particularly convenient as it saved us a lot of time. Once exported, this allowed us to easily log and transfer all footage required into final cut express. This was the beginning of our post-production.

The construction of our documentary involved the use of apple macs, similar to the technology we used to record our documentary, none of us were really familiar with how to use an apple mac so it therefore took some getting used too. Despite this, I was very impressed with the macs. Having never used the software on them before I wasn’t sure what to expect but I found that they produced a high quality clear cut project and thought using the macs were a better option than using regular windows computers as it allowed us to develop our skills. The macs are definitely something I would consider using in the future if I was to produce another project similar to this one.

The apple imac has a variety of software which we were able to use during the production of our documentary which is shown from the tool bar below.

Safari gives fast, easy web

browsing

Indesign and photoshop, used for the production of the magazine and photoshop allowed us to resize and stills we had taken from the timeline to be used in our magazine .

Garage band which we used for the production of our radio trailer.

Final cut express which we used for the actual production of our documentary.

Final cut was the software we used on the apple macs to produce our documentary. It is an advanced video editing software which includes a variety of film-specific features enabling us to produce a high quality documentary. As I said earlier, this software was new for all 3 of us. Personally, it took me a while to familiarise myself with how to use final cut. But I was soon able to recognize the basics before then developing my skills even further.

Below is the screen you get with final cut, which in fact has very useful features in enabling high quality production. The features of final cut are futher explained on the following slides.

Browser, shows all the footage we have logged and transferred

Known as the viewer, allows us to preview footage

Canvas, plays video from the time line

Used to control sound levels

Tool bar, particularly useful in terms of editing.

This panel demonstrates the sound levels which helped us see which needed seeing too, i.e if sound levels entered the red section we knew they were distorted

Time line which shows us the order of documentary, the time line can be stretched out to help position footage or make amendments to voiceover in terms of fading in and out.

Final cut offers a wide range of features, but the first and most important stage is actually logging and transferring the footage we had recorded from the cameras onto the mac itself. This was a fairly easy process, we named all the footage appropriately, making it easier when it appeared in our browser. Once everything was logged and queued we were then able to preview the footage, allowing us to distinguish what footage was successful and what footage was less successful so we could then decide what we thought would work well in our documentary before transferring it into final cut and ultimately, into our timeline.

The browser shows us all our footage which we had logged, queued and transferred. As you can see, they are all appropriately named so that this makes the process of transferring them to our timeline easier.

As already mentioned in the previous slide, the black box to the left is known as the viewer, as the name suggests it allowed us to view the clips we had logged and transferred before actually editing them. The box to the right hand side then displayed the video as it appeared on the time line. So essentially the viewer allowed us to preview before making amendments, while the canvas allowed us to watch the video back to ensure we were actually happy with it

This in particular was extremely useful in that it helped us save time, rather than simply assuming which clip we wanted to use, we could preview it before hand.

Once we were happy with the clips, this was then when we could drag them into the time line. We could then simply work from our storyboard in terms of the production of our documentary. It was simply a case of trial and error, some things didn’t work as well as we first planned so therefore needed moving around but this was easy enough to do.

Log and transfer process.

Other features of final cut included editing and this is evident in our documentary as we adopted a variety of different editing techniques. The tool bar was the most obvious and important feature of final cut, allowing us to make a variety of amendments to our documentary in order to make it flow more smoothly.

In the editing process we used some tools more than others. One tool which played an important role is the razor tool. This allowed us to crop certain parts of footage so that we could gain the most important and valuable parts which stated the most interesting points. For example, the interview with Neil Thompson was extremely long, we didn’t need the entire thing so we cropped certain points which we considered to be the most relevant.

This tool also came in useful within our opening montage. With wanting to keep up with the conventions by being upbeat short, snappy and introducing the content of the documentary, it was important to simply include important snippets of interviews and this was done using this razor tool.

The pen tool was also a useful feature of the tool bar as it allowed us to edit our sound levels. We did this a lot throughout our documentary, fading in and out interviews created a more professional approach to the documentary, rather than the sound levels being jumpy and all over the place it simply made the documentary run more smoothly.

As already mentioned, this area allowed us to establish whether sound levels during interviews and vox pops were distorted, so that we could then go back and normalise them

Sound levels could be controlled in final cut through the use of these buttons. We could simply turn off the sound to focus on other aspects, or dip the sound levels. As well as this in order to focus on just the sound, you can link and unlink the section which means the clip and sound are no longer linked. This meant we could move the clip around where necessary. With doing this we made a few mistakes where the sound was then out of sync with the clip. However, once we were all happy with the way the sound appeared in terms of being cropped we had to ensure all the sound was normalised. Certain clips may have been more obvious through the sound level section in tool bar. In order to normalise sound levels we simply had to select modify audio then normalise sound, as shown to the right.

Final cut allowed us to make various editing amendments in order to produce a documentary which followed conventions of real life products. Some of the editing techniques we used have already been mentioned and discussed within previous questions. This includes the effects we used within final cut. For example transitions.

We found there was a variety of transitions to choose from within final cut, we spent a good deal of time flicking through them in order to try and decide which would look the best. We decided the non additive dissolved gave a dramatic effect whilst at the same time didn’t come across as looking amateur so we therefore used this transition the most within our documentary. We also used cut aways on the time line which created a dramatic effect.