Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the contruction and research, planning and evaluation stages

Media technologies were a very important part of the research stage more than the planning, for each of my pieces. Using the website YouTube, i was able to download and post trailers of existing films of which i was going to analyse. YouTube is a site which can be regarded as both a film makers best friend and worst enemy. Because while a film maker can generate publicity and develop an advertising campaign on YouTube for a film to create hype and expectation, YouTube can also be used to post segments of the film on their, or even the entire film in small ten minute pieces. Despite this however YouTube can also house a lot of user generated content, bringing into the ideas of we media as it can be seen on their that people have created their own short films, animations and even written their own songs which have generated millions of hits on the site.

YouTube as a website served its uses for me in the research and evaluation stages as it allowed me to obtain the trailers that i want and download them allowing me to post them on the blog with my analysis, and it allowed me to upload my final piece onto YouTube to get more audience feedback from people.

The other huge Internet factors used throughout this course was of course the blog, which was where i have posted all my items for the world to see.

Another site which proved invaluable were IMDB (Internet movies database). IMDB proved a very useful sight in finding out information about the films which i was going to analyse in the research stage and helped me choose which film trailers to look at for ideas on the conventions on the trailers. IMDB also helped me find the posters which i was going to use as my style models for my finished piece.

Media technologies which were used not involving the Internet would be programs that were used for editing, these were Adobe Premiere Pro a video editing software and GIMP a photo shop style image editing software package.

Premiere pro served to be the primary tool used in the video editing as it provided all the necessary clip selection and arrangement options i needed to take the parts of my film from the raw footage and arrange them in the order of which i wanted them to be in.

GIMP provided the means of which i needed to edit the images, it uses all the features of Adobe photo shop it allowed me to cut out the foreground and background images from my original photos and paste them together into one image featuring customized text for the film title and tag lines.