The use of Media Technology in my Evaluation Stage

Now that I have completed my evaluation stage I can look at the media technology I used. This is a continuation of the previous media technology post.

Throughout my evaluation I used a range of different programmes to ensure that I am using my blog to its full potential. For my "In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?" post I used a website called slideshare. This allowed me to create a powerpoint presentation including links which will still work when uploaded to my blog. This makes my evaluation much more interactive for the user.

Youtube has proved very useful as it has allowed me to provide links in my work to help justify my point much more effectively. It also breaks up any writing and prevents it from being simply blocks of text. As well as this I have also used a lot of hyperlinks during my whole evaluation. This is to provide more information and detail and redirect the reader to relevant information.

There are also some very simple programmes I have used throughout my evaluation for example the use of paint to enable me to print screen and import relevant pictures. Also Microsoft powerpoint to make a much more interactive post which can then be imported into slide share.

The use of Media Technology in my Production Stage

When actually filming our final project we used digital cameras, these made it very easy to go back and watch a clip that we had already filmed to get an idea of whether or not we need to refilm. However as a result of using a tape to record rather than an SD card it was much more difficult to film over unwanted footage rather than simply deleting it.

During our editing stage we used Final cut pro and also iMovie. Although at the beginning stages we had problems working out how to make specific changes we made good use out of Youtube to research and learn new editing skill such as our slow motion effect.

When it came to creating our ancillary tasks we got a lot of use our of Photoshop CS5, this enabled us to create a lot of high quality edits and changes. For example in our poster we made a lot of changes to the background picture, for example we changed the brightness to allow the characters to stand out a lot more. Without photoshop we would have been able to achieve the results we did and to allow us to create a set of ancillary tasks relevant to our main project.

The use of Media Technology in my Pre Production Stage

For our A2 major project we chose to create a 5 minute short film. We came to this decision as we believed it would be the task that would allow us to be the most creative whilst also having enough tasks to work well as a team. Throughout the whole of the pre production stage we got a lot of use out of the internet. This was essential when it came to looking at existing short films, we used websites such youtube, bbc film network and LG short film. Looking at existing short films enabled us to be able to get an idea of the codes and conventions that were essential for us to follow. Having the technology to look online made the whole process a lot quicker and enabled us to look at a lot more examples. This was definitely helpful when it came to our final influence of the short film 'Now', this turned out to be the most helpful bit of research we carried out.

Using google docs allowed us to send out questionnaires to our target audience and gain organised feedback. It turned out much quicker and more effective than conducting it in paper form as we didn't then need to convert all the information onto the Internet. Using Google Docs also allowed us to send our questionnaire out to our target audience and target our specific audience. We then left our questionnaire online for two weeks and set a deadline as to when we would go back and collect the answers.

To ensure that I was keeping to deadlines and handing in work on time I used TomsPlanner to create a time plan. This proved extremely useful as it included all of our important deadlines and meant we could plan our filming around it. Without TomsPlanner I would have probably drew one out on paper, although at the start this would have been just as effective once it came to making slight changes it would have meant completely redoing the whole plan. This website was yet again another advantage of web 2.0.

Scribd and Flickr enabled me to make my blog much more interesting than it would be with blocks of texts or just lists of pictures. It also enabled me to scan in any work I had written on paper such as story boarding and brainstorming and present it electronically. These two websites also proved useful when it came to presenting research such as costume plans, locations shoots, and a lot of text information.

Once I carried out all my basic research we began to test shoot some of the shots we were looking to use. I am going to provide a hyperlink for a Label rather than a single post as it contains all our test shoots and analysis.

During this stage we used a lot of scribd to present our shot analysis and most importantly we used Imovie, and Final Cut as our editing software. Final cut is a lot more advanced than Imovie so allowed me to develop my editing skills ready for when it comes to editing the final piece.

Overall I believe that Media technology has definitely allowed me to produce a working blog. It also allowed me to present my work in a much more interesting way without just posting posts with just block text in. I will evaluate my

I will evaluate the use of media technology in my evaluation once I have finished all the other stages of evaluation.

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Throughout my whole A2 project I have definitely realised the importance of audience feedback. I feel this year that I have used my target audience to create a much more effective piece of work.

Having the use of Web 2.0 has improved my questionnaire techniques dramatically, I used google docs to enable me to send my questionnaire out via the facebook and blogger group. I have evaluated google docs as a programme itself in my "The use of media technology in the pre- production stage" post. As well as using google docs I also received feedback from facebook and youtube as we allowed our viewers to comment on the video and ancillary tasks.

Our target audience is based mainly around the ages of 16-20, choosing this age group allowed us to publish our questionnaire on Facebook and our Blogger page. Millions of people all over the world use facebook and the majority of people in this age range would have a wide knowledge of the internet so would find it very easy to answer our questionnaire. This proved useful as it means more people were willing to do our questionnaire as it wasn't a hard, time consuming task.

Our comments overall have been very positive and also provided us with a lot of useful feedback. We made a lot of changes throughout our project and it was here I felt the full impact of how helpful and essential audience feedback is.

We collected a lot of feedback throughout the whole process of our production, you can see how much our work has developed from this initial 'Test Filming'. We found that the audience picked up on a lot of our editing faults and the shots simply didn't follow. I have analysed this in my 'Test film Analysis' post. We found from our audience feedback that our target audience enjoyed the idea of having dream moments in our final edit, although we have made a lot of changes since this point the original concept is still included. Another major factor we changed was taking out the original dialogue, this enabled our editing to run much smoother, we also found that our target audience didn't associate any dialogue with a short film so was essential that we removed it.

Our final feedback was again collected through the use of google docs and again posted on facebook and our blogger page. By clicking onto this link you can see the questions posted to our target audience. We didn't receive as much feedback as i would have liked however it was enough to give a final conclusion to the project.

Here is a screenshot of some of the feedback:

One of the most difficult pieces of pre-production research was learning how to establish a genre into a short film, we therefore decided to focus on an emotion. As you can see from our final feedback everyone said that they felt happy and excited at the beginning but sad come the end. This gives me confidence that we have succeeded in portraying a clear and strong emotional message.

A lot of our important feedback about the short film and ancillary tasks came from a class discussion, we all had the opportunity to present our work to our teachers and classmates and then receive feedback on this. One of the most controversial points of feedback was about the ending of our short film, we had one teacher saying she liked the ending as it is as it allows the audience to make up their own mind on the ending, and the other teacher saying he found it too confusing. However after looking at all our audience feedback we collected we decided to stick to our final edit. This was mainly due to different people giving different ideas about what the whole film was about which i believe is an effective way to get people talking and discussing our project. I liked how different people decode our short film in different ways for example we had feedback of the two characters being ex-friends, in a relationship and even the extreme opinion of the girl in fact now being dead. All these different opinions is in fact exactly the response we were looking for as people are now talking about our work.

Looking back at both projects over the last 2 years I have realised the importance of audience feedback after each major decision.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

I believe that our main project and ancillary tasks follow on as well as they possibly can. The poster and our main short film are quite closely related however the film review doesn't have much relation to my other products.

To ensure that our tasks are all linked and branded together we had to understand clearly the importance of genre in a short film. I believe that Short Films tend to have their own genre and this wont necessarily be easy to establish straight away. To ensure that we created a successful short film it was essential that we followed some of the main conventions, also mentioned in this link. some of them being; a clear story line, and including no dialogue. These were our first steps to creating the genre which we then had to apply to our film poster and review.

The poster is based mainly around the two characters within the short film. We produced a fairly simple poster as we had to follow the conventions of independent film companies. Our short film is conveying happiness and excitement along with also a bit of confusion due to allowing the audience to make up their mind on what to make of the ending. We tried to convey this on our poster by keeping the two characters in a fairly simple environment. In our short film its the boy that misses out on his chance with the girl so on the poster we had the girl looking at the camera and the boy looking over his shoulder towards the girl. This automatically shows that there is some kind of relationship between the two. We were aware all along that Short Films don't tend to have a specific genre as short films are a complex genre within itself. Therefore in order to create a successful poster we had to simplify this complex genre. We therefore decided to focus more on the romantic side of our short film and convey this in our poster. These conventions involve, having a barrier (physical or imaginary) between the two characters, keeping the characters in a fairly simple environment, presenting the name of the short film in big, bold, clear text, the colour scheme e.g white is often used, the way the characters are positions convey the relationship, there isn't anything else on the poster except for the characters.

We included some reviews onto our poster which we claimed to have been taking from "short Reviews" this is in fact the film review that we created. Although the film review isn't directly related to the poster it does have pictures from our short film. I personally believe that you cant directly relate the the film review to one poster or short film as this will make it look unrealistic and unprofessional. However both follow the same colour scheme of black, white and red and also all include our logo of "walking frame productions". Although I believe we wouldn't directly influence an film review if we were to carry out a press release about the short film we would emphasise aspects of our theme.

Throughout the ancillary stage our main focus was creating a product that looks like it has been produced in the real media world. I believe that both of the designs look very professional and look as if they could represent a professionally produced short film.

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation media

View more presentations from Charley Millard.

target audience questionnaire info

We used google docs to create a questionnaire and then posted it onto our facebook page and our blogger group. We are now awaiting for people to reply.