Evaluation Task 2: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the production I used various technologies to help me complete my work and I am going to evaluate these and how I used them to complete my whole production including the trailer, poster and website. 

To begin with we had to conduct lots of research and pre-production planning. I used the website blogger to document everything that I did and I now have developed a detailed blog which demonstrates what I did and why, this includes changes that were made to improve the production and also research that I did to ensure that my production was a correct as possible. I am very familiar with this site having used it last year and therefore found it very easy to navigate around. I could very easily add a new blog post, view it and edit it if I wished to do so. I find the idea that I can edit my posts very useful because it means that I can either add content that I didn’t think of at the time of writing the post, but it also means I can change the layout etc if I wished to do so.

A feature which I found very handy this year but didn’t use last year was the draft feature, sometimes I would have left an important picture on my home computer so the draft feature meant that I could write up the rest of the post and save it as a draft so that when I was at home I knew that it needed completing. Furthermore I believe that I used the blog in a lot more detail than last year. This year I kept up to date with everything I did and I would document everything on the blog which proved extremely useful to refer back to during evaluation tasks or simply to find out what I had done on a certain day. 

In order to present information on my blog in more interesting ways than simply writing up many blogposts I used features such as Slideshare and Scribd to add more of a variety to the blog. It also allowed me to present information in it's original format such as a powerpoint presentation or a word document. 

I personally prefer the look of Scribd on my blog over Slideshare’s display. I feel as though the scroll system is more sophisticated and easier to use as well. Scribd was compatible with more formats of work which was better because I didn’t have to worry anymore about displaying my work onto the blog.

Further organisation technologies used at the beginning of our production was that my team and I created a joint dropbox account so that we could all gain access to shared data about the up and coming production and so on. An example is that after the call sheets were written up they would be uploaded to dropbox so that we all had a copy and this also meant that I could forward them to the actors.

When it came to planning the production there were a number of useful software's that we used, for example we wrote up the script on Celtx, it allowed us to create professional looking scripts which we could use ourselves as crew members but also send off to our actors who perhaps felt more like they were helping with a professional production than simply a friend’s student production.

It is very important that the actors felt that our production was properly organised and I believe that sending them a professional looking script along with a detailed call sheet provided the desired effect. I also hadn’t used Celtx last year which I believe was a big mistake, the script was done on Microsoft word and simply looked unprofessional and slightly confusing for not only the actors to understand but also for the crew to figure out what shot was next and so on.

After we had filmed the production we had to think about creating our 3 items of the promotional package. First of all we edited the trailer together, for this we used the editing software Pinnicle 15

I was already used to this software because we had used it last year during our AS Production so that was a definite benefit because we didn’t have to spend extra time learning how things worked.

This Software enabled us to add titles and logos to our trailer to make it look more official and professional. I've put in some screenshots to use as an example. It also allowed us to use a mix of both diegetic and non-diegetic music and sounds to really bring the trailer to life and make it seem believable.

However this software is also very old and therefore this restricted us on various occasions, for instance glitches would occur and we’d have to re-do certain sections and also sometimes there would be issues with saving where the programme would freeze and therefore we lost a days work and would have to re-do this.

Along with Pinnicle We used the software Audacity to add effects to particular sounds to give them more emphasis, for instance I added a number of different tracks together to help build the tension. Also we added various effects to a simple scream to create a harrowing and nightmarish noise.

To create the poster we used the editing software 'Photoshop' myself and the director are both Photography students and therefore this process was very simple because we were used to the software.

After these had been created we then though about how to distribute each section. We created a website on Wix as this is a website which allows us the create our own website and publish it as an official website. 

We also decided to create a number of social networking accounts to promote our work because we are aware of the rise in social networking and how it would be very easy for us to market our work to an audience of peers.

We used the social networking site Twitter to promote our trailer before and during release.   This was a very useful site because it allowed not only my friends and other general public to keep up to date with the film trailer but it was also a great place for cast and crew members to keep in touch with what was going on.

We also uploaded various behind the scenes and extra videos onto our vimeo accounts. I really like this site as it is fairly easy to use and navigate around. However it does take a very long time to process and upload videos which can be quite irritating and as we do not pay for our accounts we are restricted in some ways.

We decided to use Youtube to upload our final trailer onto because this is a much easier site that we are all more familiar with holding accounts of our own. Also using youtube we could create a professional looking ‘Red Herring Production’ account and upload our trailer onto that instead of simply using one of our own accounts.

Youtube was also an important part in our research phase because it enabled us to watch similar trailers with similar conventions to ours. I could then screenshot features and convert them to a PDF picture to help display research on my blog.

Overall I found the use of technology extremely important especially in comparison to last year, mainly because I had a lot more experience with the different softwares but also because I was a lot more adventurous and experimented with more softwares for example using Celtx to write up the script instead of a simple word document.