1. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? By Amaia Kurschinski

2. I used a variety of websites in my research and planning stage. I used ‘academic’ sites such as the BFI website, launchingfilms.com, an article by Dr. Eric Dodson (this article was an in depth study of Post-apocalyptic films, I found it very interesting and thoroughly helpful in my initial research). I used other sites like Wikipedia and online articles to research as well, I thought these were a great starting point for me and the articles helped me get a better idea of what was going on now in the post-apocalyptic world (‘Hollywood searches for escapism after the apocalypse’).

3. Film industry websites/commercial websites became convenient when I wanted to do research into how to market our film, as well as look at their artefacts (such as trailer, poster, DVDS). (use examples). I got inspiration for their artefacts and used some of the information I found in my promotional research. I used Google images to look at posters, magazine covers and other things. I used Google as I felt it was the best search engine to use.

4. I did go on a few fan blogs which I found using Google Search –A fan blog of The Road which followed the production and distribution journey it took. This helped me get information on marketing which I found hard to find and seeing this type of information from a fans perspective is interesting as they give their own opinion on the film. I used some of the info in my promotional research. YouTube was useful while doing the project as we were able to view the trailers freely and it was quickly available. Our group used this 2.0 website to compare trailers and view the conventions as well as get inspiration for our own trailer ideas.

5. The blog was beneficial in a way to get your ideas down onto something where they are all viewable and accessible. It allowed me to go through to previous work and research which helped me continue building our idea – to make sure we are following conventions as well as getting some inspiration. I wouldn’t say that the blog helped the communication amongst the group however we did create a Google group in which we could all communicate our spur of the moment ideas and organise ourselves. I also had connections through the social network site Facebook with some of our group members as well as having their phone numbers, in case anything urgent came up.

6. I presented my work a lot of my work on the software Microsoft PowerPoint. Mainly because I’m most comfortable with it. It allows me to present my work in a way that looks good. I’m also able to add animations however I prefer not to as it’s not really my style of work. I used this to do my initial research on the post-apocalyptic and the social realism genre, my initial film idea and 2 of my evaluation questions. I linked it on the blog (example below).

7. Another presentation software is ‘Prezi’ which is accessible through the internet. It allows you to create presentations, the same as PowerPoint but uses more movement and animation. You are able to slide from each ‘section of information’ with a click of the button. I felt confident using it as its similar to PowerPoint – however I did find that it took longer to complete each ‘slide’ (forming the animation). I used prezi for evaluation question 3 and also for my promotional research. I embedded my Prezi presentation’s by copying the embed code on the Prezi website, clicked the ‘html’ tool on the blog and pasted the code in the space provided.

8. I did use Timetoast for my post apocalyptic/social realism timelines at the beginning of the project. It’s another internet based software – accessible to the public. I did like it a lot, I thought it worked extremely well for timelines. I considered doing evaluation question 4 on Timetoast however there would the barrier of not being able to add many picture examples to my presentation. A lot of my work is presented on the blog as well, I felt that for some of my research/reviews are best to be shown on the blog – it looked a lot better having things physically viewable on their rather than having lots of links to things. It would be tedious and boring.

9. On the blog I uploaded files/image/videos and then imported them into my blog posts. I used them in my blog posts by clicking either the ‘video’/ ‘image’ tool and linking the files. I linked words so that it would link to my work or other relevant web pages. I did this by highlighting a word, clicking the ‘link’ tool and then pasting a URL or an uploaded file.

10. When doing my little white lies cover I went on the. online magazine to look at the style of the whole thing as well as to get an idea of a conventional little white lies cover – this helped me create one which would fit in well with this magazine.

11. We really got hands on when producing our film. We used a variety of different media technologies. The first is the DSLR 550D camera with a 35mm lense, but using mostly the 50mm lense which is most like the lenses they use in film. The vast difference you can see from the cameras we used before is amazing. What we found tricky with the 50mm lense is that you had to have a set distance and were unable to zoom, however we had fun playing around with the focus while filming. We created many different shots with this camera We also used the boom mike to record dialogue for our trailer – something that me and Lauren used for when we were filming our non-diegetic foley sounds. We held it above the actors head for dialogue and close to sounds/objects to get the foley sounds.

12. When we got into the edit suites we were amazed to find Macintosh computers, it was something new to experience as we were used to Windows. We used Adobe Premiere to edit our trailer. We used this software last year and an editing workshop with the teacher to refresh and relearn things was all that was needed. If only our Adobe Premier worked as slickly as the Macs we would’ve had our trailer finished in no time. That was not the case and something went wrong and our file was enlarged enormously – everything went extremely slow, wasting lots of time. We first imported our ‘best cuts’ into Adobe premiere, dragged the shot we liked into the viewing screen to view the shot. We then made an input and output mark on the parts we liked best– dragging that onto our timeline. Slowly creating our trailer. We viewed our timeline on the second viewing screen. Exporting our final cut and uploading onto YouTube.

13. I used the software Adobe Photoshop to create my poster and magazine cover. I was unsure how to use it but after a workshop I learned my way around it quickly. The programme allowed me to create the post apocalyptic feel and make it look professional. I also converted my Photoshop images to jpeg’s so that I could upload them on the blog. I created three layers of my image 'original', 'face', 'background'. I used the lassoo polynomial tool to create a marquee around the character and deleted the background on the 'face' as I wanted to cut it out and put it on a different background. I used feather to make sure that the edge of the image isn't too harsh cut when putting it on another background.

14. I added an image from Google to use as the background layer, I edited it in black and white and added an exposure layer to create the post apocalyptic feel. I added two more layers which I used in my poster to help add to the post apocalyptic feel (grungy backgrounds). I made them transparent so that we can see the underneath layers. I then stuck images of transparent cans in the background. I dragged the layer of the face above the background and added the 'watercolour' filter. As looking at other Little White Lies covers all their images of the characters look as if they've been painted/drawn/collaged. I also adjusted the hue/saturation.

15. Finally I put the title of the magazine, changed the date and also wrote the title in an independent font - for independent magazine. Final Cover

16. This was my starting image which we took on one of our filming days. I then added the filter 'diffuse glow' and curves which changed the contrast between light and darks. I added scratchy dark layers (grungy) and used the opacity tool to make them transparent. I used this to add a post apocalyptic effect which is similar to The Road Poster

17. I added text - looking for fonts which I thought work well with our genre and also the credits, using fonts from dafont.com. The teacher showed me a way to add depth to my text by adding shadows/glows/colour - which makes the text stand out from the page rather than just flat. Final Poster

18. We used the voiceover sound kit, which allowed us to do non-diegetic dialogue over our trailer. The voiceover was used to introduce the character and to set the scene. We also added sound effects to our trailer, which we found on the school’s computer database to help give our trailer another dimension. We just imported them into Adobe premiere and dragged it on our timeline underneath the shots we wanted. When looking for soundtracks for our trailer we looked on copyright free music sites which were ‘Incomputech’ and ‘The Audio Network’. The Audio Network was the better site but you did have to pay for the soundtrack. We wanted a good trailer so we thought this was a worthy buy. We imported these into Adobe Premiere, inputted, outputted and dragged it onto our timeline. We then used the ‘razor’ tool to cut the music to fit our film.