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

The majority of research was done via the internet. Much of the tropes of the genres can be found online in list form. This showed us conventions; what we should include in our film in order to appeal to our target audience as well as lists of classic films in our genre. Therefore, letting us see what fans of the genre look for in a film. However, many of the lists and articles online are subjective and generally opinion of the author so this became time consuming due to having to 'cross reference' them and get an overall opinion. The lists of films were helpful but there was some issues when trying to find certain films for example, on things such as Netflix, it is hard to find a lot of older and less well known films especially in the horror genre as it doesn't appeal to as large an audience as comedy. Modern technology does make visually amazing films for example, the ever growing advancements of CGI but, it has not made it any easier to find less popular/ more obscure films and film genres 


When we were filming, we were able to use a high quality camera and stabiliser. This made our shots look more professional, with a shaky camera it would look wrong for the genre and mood we were trying to convey. This also helped when creating the ancillary tasks, the images looked sleek like they would on an actual poster or in a magazine. 

We used software on the mac called final cut pro to edit our film. This caused us some problems as it is difficult to use at first, the macs also run slow for the editing we needed so it did become tedious at times. However, we were able to do what we had originally envisioned such as creating a blue, washed out filter to create a cold feeling, changing from shallow to deep focuses and editing separately filmed parts together. When the film was (finally) finished we discovered that it would not be simple to upload. We were told the resolution was too high and would have to be downgraded in order to upload. After doing this, the film lost some of the clean cut, quality that I loved about our film and that is where technology failed us the most in the project. For the ancillary tasks, I used a programme called pixlr to edit my photos and create the poster and article. For me, this was easy as I have used it many times in other projects and just to experiment with, it is useful that all of the editing i need was available for free online when many other editing software is only available when downloaded and paid for.

In the evaluation stage (and throughout the project), everything was documented on blogger. This is a site i have grown to like, at first it was incredibly difficult to use and create the layout i wanted to after a while, i began to appreciate having all of my posts in one place, this is the place I was less dependant on technology. However, i was using the print screen button to take direct screen captions from our film from you tube and the exporting the print screen to became a jpg. In comparison, this is a piece of cake to what was done in the construction stages.

During the project, I have learned that the best way to use new technology is to experiment with different aspects of the programme eventually you learn how to use it and make something you want to and not be limited to how much you know about how the programme works. I have also learned that i can get very frustrated when faced with slow working computers and definitely need to learn to be more patient.