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

In the research part of our product, we used new media technologies in a few different ways.

One of these was using Youtube to look at previous trailers for soaps/teenage dramas. This was very useful when we were deciding on locations to use, as well as camera angles and effects.

We also used Google during the planning stage, mainly for character research. It was very important that we had characters in the soap which appealed to all types of young adult, so by researching other program's set of characters, we could see what type of characters to use.

During the construction stage of our project, one of the main programs that we used was Adobe Photoshop CS5. This program was very useful when we were putting together our poster and magazine. Here is one of the ways that we used Photoshop during the construction of our poster:

This is how our images were after we originally took the photographs. We now needed to manipulate them so that they looked like they had all been taken at the same time and in the same place. To do this we changed the brightness and contrast of each picture individually until they matched the picture that we had decided to use as a template, this was the image of the 'Sex God'. Once they were all similar, we used the magnetic lasso tool to cut around each character and remove the background. We did this because we needed to characters on our police line up background. Once each individual image was done, we copied them on to our background by duplicating the layer and then changed all of the images together to black and white, by turning the saturation down.

When we added the E4 logo, we first added it to the corner of the poster. On reflection we felt that the poster looked a little plain and it needed more depth, it was a little too 2D. So we changed the logo by making it larger, we then turned the opacity down to 50% and tilted the logo to the left using the rotation tools on the points of the image.




We also used Photoshop in the construction of our poster. We used the shape tools to add a masthead to our main image and a bar across the bottom of it, we also added a circle to put the price of the magazine in to make it eye catching. Another tool that we used was the text tool, which is how we added our title and tag line to the image.


The camera that we used to shoot our footage was a HD camera so it gave us a higher quality image, and made our piece look more professional.



We used Adobe Premire Pro CS5 to edit out footage. Here is one of the ways we used the software:

Throughout the editing process, we changed the speed of many of clips, slowed them down and sped them up. As trailers are usually only 60-90 seconds, we had to fit alot of footage into a short time. Trailers are choppy and they get straight to the point, so in many cases we increased the speed of clips, had lots of snappy cuts and we have included a wide range of shots and angles. Insome cases we have slowed down clips for an atmospheric effect and to fit with music.
For example :-

During the board scenes, we firstly use a quick long shot, but then cut quickly to a closer shot, so the boards are more readable, but also because its snappier and more contemporay style of editing.



During the montage, many of the clips have been sped up to keep they quick and choppy, for example the speed on this clip is 200%.




With Becci's introduction we mixed slow and fast clips, we used 1-3 of quick choppy cuts then for clip 4 we slowed it down to fit with the music and to focus on the content of the scene then clip 5 is fast paced and quickly jumps to 6. It fits well with the themes and trailer conventions as it is edgy and flows with the music in a dramatic way.

The main technology that we used during our evaluation stage was obviously Blogger! But as there were some problems with it during the last week before our deadline we had to use alternative methods until we could publish.

• We used Microsoft Powerpoint to make a slide show to answer one of the questions and then used Slideshare, an online unloader to embed the powerpoint in to Blogger.

• We used Photoshop to put a few images together and add text, which we later uploaded to Blogger.


• We used Premire Pro to make a video of our audience feedback.