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

Pretty much all of my media products have benifited greatly from new media technologies. If I had tried to do this project 10 years ago I would have probably found it a lot more difficult (mainly because I would have only been 8). Technology has improved so much over the past 10 years meaning that it is possible to achive much more with much less.

Research and Planning.

The main way of researching information that has helped me the most is the beloved search engine Google. If I had wanted to research other films without the use of the internet or a search engine I would have had to trail through thousands of movie magazines looking for the right articles and finding out what I could from the little amounts of information, also when I was designing my zombies I was able to just type in zombie and the image search came up with about 11,800,000 results, the same applied for when I wanted to look at magazine covers and film posters. The same applies for the video streaming site Youtube.

I was able to watch the trailers of all the different films out there for free without having to buy, rent or borrow vidoes and DVDs from people. Not only could I watch the big blockbuster films but I could also look at other amature film makers ideas such as Colin which was made for £45 which meant that I would have a chance with my low budget.

Youtube was also very helpful in helping me plan and figure out how to do the special effects.

A Youtube channel called 'Indie Mogul' has lots of videos that are specially made for amature film makers giving out tips and advice on things such as setting up camera rigs and stuff but also on how to make special effects like blood packs and severed limbs. This was extremely helpful to me when I created the blood pouch for the zombie attack scene in my trailer.

Filming and Photographing.

A piece of new media technology that has been extremely useful in the making of my trailer is the 'Panasonic AG-HMC41' digital camera that was provided by my college for me to film with. It is capable of filming in full 1080p however because I was only editing on a regular college computer I had the settings on 720p so that I wouldn't make the computer explode with runtime errors.

Upsides to this technology are that rather than using tape which can run out very quickly depending on how much filming you do, whereas when you have a 16gb SD card you can film for ages provided you have enough batteries which is good when you have to do lots of takes. This particular camera model is also really lightweight which meant that it was ideal for carrying around to different corridors and stuff. Because of this I also filmed quite a few scenes using steadycam or handheld. One final advantage is that when it became time to edit my footage I was able to just copy and paste the files over to the computer rather than having to sit and export it all over from the tape.

Another new media technology that helped greatly is the digital cameras that are available now. Using them instead of old cameras that use film means that you can look at your shots after taking them and can also take as many as you want (if you have enough memory on your SD card) without the added cost of having to buy film and pay someone to develop it, I talk about the number of photos in the video below.

The Nikon digital SLR that I used was great at capturing a high quality image in the studio especially when it was linked up to the large flash lights that were set up. The majority of the photos looked almost good enough to use without any editing, however because I wanted the Image to be more striking and also on a different background I would have to use some editing software such as Adobe Photoshop.

Editing.

The first stage of editing is to find all the best sections from your filming and match them up to the correct places on the storyboard. Fortunately on Adobe Premiere if you're sensible and put all your video clips into named folders then they are easily accessible in the sidebar.

Editing using this digital technology is much easier than trying to piece bits of film together like you would have done a long time ago, and the layout of the software is quite simple to use once you get used to it.

The layout of my project was moderately simple because I wanted to try and keep all of my video files on one layer, my audio is on several tracks though because I included the main non digetic song along with the TV static sounds as well as the audio from particular video files and bits that I had to dub in later (also I know how cool my computer wallpaper is).

The number of readily available effects that can be used on Adobe Premiere is amazing too. I used various colour grading tools to make certain clips match the tone of the film and also consistent in scenes where the light changes halfway through. The main effect that I used however was Ghosting, It is a cool blur like effect that I think works really well for chaotic scenes. Here's a video of me applying it to a section of my trailer.

Photo editing also played a large part in this project. I used the hue and saturation tools quite a lot to mess with the colours and played with the contrast as well to make my images as striking as possible. Doing things like this would be quite difficult to achieve in a dark room so I am glad that editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop are available for general use.

One thing that played a large part in my photo editing is how easy it is to remove backgrounds from photos that have been taken in the right environment. There are multiple ways to do it that vary from the Lasso tool to the magic wand tool. I have uploaded a video of me removing the background from the main image of my magazine so that I can place it onto any background.

Once you have an image of someone/something with the background removed you can put it pretty much anywhere you like.

Here is my main image with the background removed, I then had the option to put it on the background that I had pre prepared of college or a stock photo of some sheep. For quite obvious reasons I decided on the one of college so that I could continue editing and finish my work.

Other effects that I also made use of with new media technology was adding some smoke/fog to my image to make it more eerie. Instead of going down the old fashioned route of getting the fog machine going in the studio I used a filter in Photoshop called "render clouds".

If I had tried creating the poster and the magazine cover for my project without this new media technology I think I would have struggled greatly.

Evaluating.

The way that new media technology has helped me in the evaluating stages is the development of social networking sites such as Facebook. Every piece of work that I created along with lots of photos taken during filming and editing ended up on Facebook at some point so that I could get feedback from people without having to always go and personally ask them.

I also uploaded my videos onto Youtube mainly just so that I could post them onto this blog, so I did not receive any comments on them.