How did you use new How did you use new media technologies in the media technologies in the

construction, research, construction, research, planning and evaluation planning and evaluation

stages?stages?

Our EquipmentOur Equipment

Our production would not have been anything without these three key pieces of equipment, they where the vital elements in the construction of out film. The camera we had access to this year was SD rather than Hi8 (our camera provided for AS year) which made getting our footage onto the computer a far easier process than it was previously. Having our footage on SD cards also meant we could speedily surf through different clips rather than being forced to save every piece of test footage that would be totally unusable. Perhaps one of the more consequential pieces of equipment for this years production was the voice recorder. In order to tie our entire production together we needed a very smooth voice-over which eased the transition from scene to scene. Due to the fact that documentaries are forced to deliver a lot of information in a short space of time means that the voice-over is a key feature. Without the voice recorder our entire production would have made less than no sense.

In terms of blogging sites, Wordpress was the best choice for this style of multi-modal blog. Alternative more “social” blogs such as ‘Tumblr’ would not have been able to present the information we needed to convey in the blogs in such a slick professional way. Also with other blogs such as Blogspot and Blogger , accessing them through the college would have been impossible due to the filtering system , Wordpress did not incur such problems. Wordpress offers a simple layout where the dashboard section provides an extremely easy way of adding new posts as well as manipulating work you have already posted. Embedding videos and slides as well as adding links and pictures is an extremely easy process, and it is quick and convenient to make every post varied. Being able to back-date posts was also a massively helpful feature as open our work was not posted or completed in the correct order therefore back-dating it made our blog look far more fluid.

YouTube was a vital tool when it came to researching relevant documentaries and reality shows that could provide a basis for our work. Buddhism was a topic that could have been extremely hard to find relevant T.V material, but thanks to the vast backlog of videos available to us we were able to find approaches to Buddhism that were both extremely serious in their content and also ones that were much more light hearted. Due to this vast range of footage available we could cherry-pick the best parts of each style for documentary. Also the availability of full episodes of ‘Worlds Strictest Parents’ and Dawn Porters ‘Super Slim Me’ meant we were able to gain a picture of how entire documentaries and culture clash shows came together. Also seeing as our documentary was supposed to be a hybrid of both, these full shows were completely crucial in constructing a picture of how our final 5 minute piece might look.

Premier ElementsPremier Elements Premier Elements has perhaps been the most essential piece of new media technology that we utilised. This video editing software was the reason we were able to make our film come together. In our AS year, the video effects and transitions saved our project completely and it has very much been the case in our A2 year. Titles, transitions (our mots used being the ‘fade to black’) were all extremely effective in making our documentary feel like a polished television worthy production. The software was very easy to use and it was very straightforward to input and

manipulate footage. Premier was a massive step up from the apple software that we were originally trained and it made video editing enjoyable rather than a task. The multiple audio and visual tracks were extremely helpful when crossing different types of audio. Having the ability to manipulate voiceover and music to different volumes meant that we could run both at the same time; this in turn meant we could maintain the flow of the documentary with the music while explaining what was going on at the same time.

Slideshare has been an extremely beneficial tool in our research and evaluation stages of our project. Slideshare provides a service that lets you convert windows PowerPoint presentations into embeddable web slide-shows. It was through Slideshare that we were able to start our project and our blog due to the fact that it provided us the tool to create our first post. The ‘Oh Danny Boy’ plan was created as a PowerPoint presentation because of its easy readability and aid in demonstrations. In order to convert it into a web friendly format, Slideshare was invaluable. Slideshare was an extremely easy service to use in terms of both conversion and embedding. As a group our only trouble with the site, or rather minor annoyance, was the fact that converted PowerPoint's cannot be retrieved and put back into their original windows format. We unfortunately lost some of our ‘Oh Danny Boy’ presentation, and it would have saved us considerable time had we been able to attain it in it’s un-converted form.

Vimeo was the video conversion website which enabled us to take our work from the edited versions saved in various formats from premier elements

and convert it into embeddable web files. Vimeo has been an indispensable tool when it comes to the construction and evaluation stages of our project. Vimeo was the only medium for which we could get our edited footage on the internet. Without this site, there would have been no way we could have posted our initial drafts of ‘Oh Danny Boy’ on the internet and gotten audience feedback. Vimeo was familiar technology to our group as it was the same conversion program that we utilised in our AS year; it was key for getting our videos to a medium where they could be shared and reviewed. Vimeo was a key technology when it came to making our blog multi-modal, without it, none of our finished videos would be available for public consumption.