Final Evaluation Q4

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

There is not a doubt in my mind that without most of the technologies that we used during the making of our coursework, our film would not exist. However in reference to ‘new media’ the main form of technology we used to help us through out the different stages of the entire production is the internet. This mainly includes my blog, search sites for research, videos and more. The internet has endless amounts of information that was useful and relevant to our coursework. The main search site I used was Google. This allowed for me to narrow down all of the web pages on the internet to my relevance. Youtube was also very helpful when it came to finding information videos such as the ones I viewed about Cinematography. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDMRB5cCrzY) Everything that we have created so far on paper or on the computer has been either scanned in (paper versions) or copied onto the blog to keep on record. This allowed us as a class to view on a large projector screen and give feedback or evaluations without everyone looking at a single sheet of paper that includes our storyboard- they now have the opportunity to look at it on a large screen. After drawing the storyboard it went through stages to appear there-which all included technologies of new media. First it needed to be scanned onto a computer, the scanned JPEG image was then uploaded onto a PowerPoint document, then that document was uploaded on a document sharing website called SlideShare; finally after getting the embed code, pasting it onto my blog as an entry. This was done with many entries that included any type of pictures. The videos that were uploaded from my camera onto my computer were then uploaded on a video sharing site like Youtube or Tinypic and then later posted on my blog in video format. This allowed for people to see ‘samples’ of the final product in video format as opposed to simple pictures. This can be seen on the post about Monster Masks where I constructed masks that were going to be featured in the opening sequence of our film. The video displayed the masks just as they were going to be in the film. This allows others to see the thoughts and ideas in our heads easier that just by description through word.

Another way we used our blog as a product of new media was by viewing each others blogs and leaving each other comment feedbacks so they can easily be accessed and viewed by each person. To address the digital side of new media- Adobe Photoshop was the most used program when it came to creating any type of enhanced picture project. This includes our original moodboard for the color red, world our film collages, and both of our ancillary texts. I was familiar with Photoshop from using for quite a few parts of our coursework for the AS Production, however that does not compare to how much I learned this year from having to use it so much. We are very fortunate to have such programs at our disposal as it makes the image editing process so much easier and more creative. The posters took an extremely long time to complete due to the constant feedback we kept receiving, however having it saved as a Photoshop file, it was always easy to go back to the program and make any needed adjustments to the layers. This would be impossible to do on a hand drawn artwork without completely restarting the artwork. The editing program we used, Adobe Premiere, is also made by the same company. This can be seen as media convergence when two areas of the media come together to form a new sector. This results in two programs having similar functions, therefore being easy to use same images/videos/ideas for both of them.

The production side of the filmmaking process has been so highly improved over the past years to make it easier and more practical to make films. This can be addressed from the point of portability. Almost everything but the desktop computers was portable. This results in going on location-such as the park- without having to recreate the set where the equipment is. By digitally recording the video on a tape it is easy to digitize it onto the computer and digitally cut it without having reels of tape and having to physically cut it by hand like years ago. Computers can easily read the tape and view the videos that have just been recorded instantly; this makes it very universal. Having all the information saved on a computer makes it very accessible and easy to view without any special arrangements. My group could easily edit the film individually without everyone having to be there because we had such simple access to the computers.

As I mentioned earlier, for the evaluation/feedback stages we used the blogs to leave each other comments. For this final evaluation I am using Microsoft Word to write my evaluation. It is much easier than writing a few thousand words out by hand. Also, once I am finished it will take just a few seconds to post it on my blog. New media has made everything instant and easily reachable within a few clicks.