How I used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and

evaluation stages …

• For all three of my products (the documentary, the poster and puff piece) I have had to rely on a new kind of media technology for example, final cut pro and Photoshop. With out these tools I wouldn’t have been able to create the marketing campaign I did, nor the documentary.

• Also while shooting for the documentary we had an extra piece of equipment which was a microphone – this helped massively towards the picking up of sound that wasn’t needed/wanted for example, the wind. The microphone meant that the interviewees voice didn’t get lost under the sound of the wind.

• The different media platforms such as, YouTube and Iplayer have really allowed me to constructively and effectively carry out my research and planning, while websites such as Emaze, Piktochart and Prezi have allowed me to present all of my research in a creative and constructive way.

Final cut pro …• Final cut pro offers so many opportunities when I comes down to post

production and producing a film to the best of your ability. For example, on final cut pro you are able to add music behind the footage and make it fade in and out. This is a tool that was extremely helpful while editing my documentary as, there is music playing along behind it, therefore we need it to naturally fade in and out to suit the naturalism of the play.

• Final cut pro helps you to turn your footage into anything you want.• The large choice of different fonts is exciting as you get to

experiment with different types of looks – the font is very significant towards the effect your film has and weather or not it succumbs to the conventions of your genre. For example, we were able to follow the common feature in documentaries which is text:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHVmIC-1b-g

Effect of final cut pro on my research and planning …

• Because of the tools final cut offers you such as: cutting tools that allow you to make the shots shorter, being able to create different ways of transitioning from shot to shot for example, fading – it meant that during my research I had to really look out for how documentaries were edited; what sort of font did they use, how fast was the pace of cutting, did they have voice over’s or music playing over it.

• Final cut pro allowed me to include many conventions of a documentary, therefore making it clear what genre it belongs to.

Photoshop …• I used photo shop for both the poster and the puff piece.• Photoshop allows you to add pictures and edit them for

example, in the making of the poster we got pictures of the people we interviewed and were able to crop out the background so that is was just them and nothing else. It also allows you to experiment with colours, different fonts and to play around with the structure of the text for example, when making the puff piece I was able to bend the text around a picture – which is a very common feature in magazine reviews.

Examples of how we used photo shop:

Bent text around the picture.

Photo shop also provided the ability to download different fonts and use them

Photoshop allowed us to create cut outs of the people in our film and overlap them to create a collage effect.

We were also able to add the BBC3 ident, which is vital as, our audience needs to know who is hosting it as this has a significant impact on what sort of documentary it will be. If they are a fan of BBC3 then they will want to watch it.

We were also able to experiment with different types of font, therefore allowing us to continue following the conventions of how a documentary is marketed: we decided to go with a simple font.

The effect photo shop had on my research and planning …

• Because of the tools photo shop offers for example, editing pictures, large choice of fonts and backgrounds I understood that there wasn’t a limit to what you could do on photo shop and that you could pretty much create anything you like, so while looking at posters for documentaries and TV program's in general I was able to not rule anything out because I knew it was all possible to do. This meant I could create a poster that fully catered to what my target audience wanted to see and was able to follow the conventions of a BBC3 poster for example, the pink background, the BBC3 ident and the simple fonts.

Technology used while filming.• Camera lens: When shooting our documentary we had two different

lenses, a wide lens and a smaller lens – we used the wide lens to shoot the establishing shots as it was able to capture a lot more into the shot, whereas the smaller lens had a smaller frame, so was used for the actual interviews as it meant we could get the conventional ‘talking heads’ shot – this is a medium close up allowing you to clearly see their face and some of the background behind them and is commonly used for interviews.

• Microphone: Because we were filming outside we knew that we would come into contact with problems such as natural/surrounding sounds – the camera on its own would not be able to clearly and effectively pick up what the interviewees are saying so, we decided to use a microphone, it was small therefore easy to carry around the location and simply clipped onto the top of the camera. The microphone meant we were able to pick up the speech of the people we spoke to, with out factors such as the wind interfering.

How these technologies effected my research ad planning.

• Because I had these camera lenses and microphones available to me I really had to look and listen closely to the documentaries I watched for research to educate myself on what lens they would use for what – it was evident after a while that they used the wider lens for establishing shots in order to get a nice, clear and wide shot and the smaller lens for the interview so that the audience wouldn’t get distracted by everything that is going on around them.

• It was also evident from my research that while documentaries have the ‘realism’ effect so natural sounds such as the wind and traffic they still have the focus on what is being said – this is clearly done using a microphone, which causes the voices to be over the natural sounds rather than the other way round.

How I have used different media platforms …

• Websites such as youtube and BBC3 have played a vital and significant part in the making of the documentary as I was able to use them for my research and planning, allowing me to fully understand the important and conventional features of a documentary. BBC3 has a whole section on documentaries, allowing me to watch many of them to get an overall understanding of what sort of documentaries they host and the common features in them for example, what sort of titles are used and the overall feel to it. Youtube on the other hand streams a variety of different documentaries allowing me to gather a wider understanding in general rather than limiting myself to the BBC3 type documentary.

The use of software programs

• Software programs were most significant when it came to evaluating my documentary for example, slideshare, prezi and Emaze – these all allowed me to present what I had learnt in a creative and interesting way, I could break up what I had learnt into sections rather than plainly writing it down in a long paragraph. It allowed me to simply overlook everything I had done, and clearly showed my journey.

All of the technologies mentioned have been extremely useful to me in the making of our documentary. Each of them offer different things and have effected our choices in different ways – if I didn’t have these technologies available I wouldn’t have been able to create a documentary that my target audience would want to watch, nor would I be able to include the common codes and conventions of a documentary.