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

Here is a list of some of the technologies I have used:

•Youtube
•Blogger
•Adobe Photoshop CS5
•Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
•Adobe After Effects CS5
•Royalty Free Music/sounds websites
•Sony Handycam

And of course various other standard hardware and software such as the Windows and Apple operating systems, the PC's and Mac's themselves, microphones for when we re-done some of the sounds, and survey monkey as part of our audience research.

In terms of the construction of my project, this was largely down to Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro - although pretty much all of the technologies I have listed link in at some point. Although everyone else in our group used Final Cut Pro to edit their video, my group and I chose to use Adobe Premiere Pro. This was largely down to the fact that no-one in our group was experienced in Final Cut Pro, but I did know how to use Premiere Pro - which is just as good. Therefore I took it upon myself to teach my other group members how to use it, and they picked it up pretty quick as it is farily simple to use. Premiere pro is a very professional video editing tool. Whilst more basic video editing software  such as Windows Movie Maker will allow you to import, cut and add transitions to your clips, Premiere Pro offers far more detail and complexities so you can get your video looking exactly how you want it to. This is mainly down to the use of keyframes for effects and fades - but also the vareity of effects on offer and how you can be specific with any effect you choose - for example selecting a colour to tint your video, and furthermore the percentage which you want it to be tinted.

Other things such as multiple tracks in the timeline help, especially with things such as music, as it allows you to have music and  multiple sound effects used at the same time, something which basic video editors will not offer. Without Premiere Pro, our video would have been very basic and would have failed as a product due to a lack of more professional editing techniques.

Another Adobe video editor I used was Adobe Afer Effects CS5. Once again this was a program which I already knew from self teaching and watching tutorials. After Effects is a program which allows you to go more in depth with effects, and is only used to create small clips, not edit an entire video. it was used to create the intertitles in our videos, and also the 'Crash Site' title at the end. The title system in premier pro is limited compared to after effects, in which you can do almost anything with any  specific letter or word, whereas Premiere Pro tends to restrict you to one basic title and basic transition. The 'Crash Site' title at the end of our video would also not have been able to be achieved in Premiere Pro. It made use of a mask which moved across as smoke moved across the screen, revealing the titles of the film as the smoke went past it. Complex titles like this could not have been achieved without a specific effects editor such  as After Effects.

The third and final Adobe product I used was Photoshop - this was used to create my movie poster and Magazine Cover. Photoshop is an industry standard image editor, which I had previously learnt during my AS media course, and had a small amount of experience with previously. Photoshop allows you to manipulate  images in almost anyway, changing their position and looks as you wish, and splitting every different Item on your image (Eg one piece of text, one image) into layers so that you can specifcally edit each item. The windows Movie Maker Equivlent here would be Paint, which is far to basic to create anything more than one single image and offers next to no image editing tools compared to photoshop. Without Photoshop or anything  of equivalent standard, I would not have been able to create the professional and effective products that I think I have made.

The HD Sony Handycam camera we used also helps to create a professional look as it offers much higher quality than DV or standard definition camera. Using a poorer quality camera such as those would have made our Trailer look very amature right through the whole trailer, but the Sony Handycam allowed us to have a professional looking trailer.

The websites that we used also helped us greatly. Survey Monkey helped us a lot during our planning stages as it allowed us to carry out our audience resreach over the internet, collating our results in to one easy place and giving us percenatages. Using a website to conduct our survey also meant we were able to share our survey with people across social networking sites such as facebook ad twitter in order to get results, which proved successful. Without all this, we would have had to hand out seperate sheets of paper to people fo them to fill in and then hand us back - using survey monkey and social networking is cleary a more appealing and efficient way to do this.

Other websites used are Youtube, Blogger and The royalty free msuic websites. Youtube has us to upload our video for everyone to see so we can gather feedback for it for our evaluation - without this we would have to show it to people individually, and would only be able to show it to people who we could get in front of the same computer as us. Youtube allows anyone in the world with internet access to see it. And of course, Blogger - the very website in which I am now. Blogger allows me to post everything about my work - from my images and videos to text and links, blogger allows me to be creative with my blog, rather than just having nothing but text.

Without websites such as blogger and youtube, would there be any other viable, sensible alternative? Probably not. Questions could be answered via simple essays, but essays on paper are a very boring way to do such things, and exclude all the things blogger offers such as the ability to add images, links and videos. Not only this, but since Blogger is a blog, it allows all your work to be in one placeand have 'labels' so that it is easier to navigate. Essays tend to be standalone peices of work, and huge walls of text with no colour or images certainly do not make your audience want to read and pay attention.Youtube allows the video to be uploaded for the world to see, and then you can simply embed it into your blog. This is a much better method than trying to upload the video to blogger which would have to be heavily compressed, whereas Youtube allows huge files to be uploaded. Youtube also allows things such as comments and likes on your video, as well as the ablity to share it. Without Youtube or blogger, the video would simply be a file which you could only show people in person assuming you had a computer to both watch it on.