1. Evaluation Question 4 HOW DID YOU USE NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

2. Research During my research stages, I used many websites such as IMDB, Wikipedia (providing I checked all information was true afterwards), Rotten Tomatoes, YouTube and social media sites. These all helped me towards my research of the crime genre and crime films. IMDB was particularly helpful as I knew all the information was correct as it is the official film website, this gave me the actors names, images of both the cast and film, release dates, genre, reviews and other informative text. Wikipedia was good for starting points but I then had to do further research to find out if all the information was correct. Rotten Tomatoes and social media sites were handy for finding out the reviews and what others thought of the film. Official film sites, YouTube and Facebook pages helped me to find out how the film was marketed before the release and after.

3. Research For my research tasks I had to research genre and postmodernism and trailer analysis. For the genre and postmodernism tasks I used lots of websites like Wikipedia, media blogs, theorist websites, IMDB and more. For my trailer analysis I mainly used YouTube. This is because it is a free website that I can view nearly every trailer for every film as this is how film companies market their films. I used this website to take screenshots, replay the trailers, observe, analyse and collect information about the films I was researching. I also used to google to find starter points about films and things like the Mise-En-Scene of film trailers. This gave me results of some Prezis and blogs about crime trailers, this allowed me to go into depth about the film trailers as I had a starter point to come from.

4. Research I used a timeline website called Tiki-Toki to create my timeline on crime films. This was a really good website that was free and allowed you to add videos, photos and text. It also allowed you to space out your inputs, add a background and gave you a link to embed your timeline. Another application I used was Photoshop, I used this after I scanned written text into the computer and converted them to make them look more appealing on my blog. I have also used PowerPoint for quite a lot of my posts as I think it is a professional looking way of doing things that is free and easy to use.

5. Planning For my planning stages, I used Photoshop, Word, YouTube, Prezi and posted directly onto the blog. I used Photoshop in my planning stages to create interesting looking posts so that they were appealing to my blog. For example, here I have made a circle and put images and text inside of it to make it more interesting that just a normal blog post. On the other two images I have coloured the pages so that the writing stands out and so that it looks more interesting.

6. Planning I used word to create tables within my blog. I found this was easiest to do with word. I then print screened these tables and uploaded them as files to my blog We used YouTube for our pitch we filmed it on a flip up camcorder and then uploaded it to YouTube. This allowed us to receive any comments on our pitch and also allowed other people to view our pitch. Alongside this we used Prezi to write out our pitch script. We then embedded both of these onto our blogs.

7. Blogs We used a blog to log all of our work and upload our posts too. This made it easy to keep track of our work and display our coursework all in one place. Quack Blogs also allow you to make different categories within the blog which made it easy to navigate my four categories; Research, Planning, Construction and Evaluation. These blogs also gave us multiple ways of presenting our work on different platforms by allowing us to embed and upload. We could also post directly onto the blogs and upload photos which I did quite frequently, especially on the planning category. We were also able to access blogs of the previous years – this meant we were able to get ideas of A grade blogs and potentially upgrade our blogs to that standard.

8. Music and SFX In our trailer, we used two main tracks. One was more relaxed and the other was very upbeat and fast paced. We felt we needed to use two so that the speed of the music changed with the speed of the clips to increase the intensity. One of our tracks was by LiftMusic, we were given the rights to use this song along with other ones. This meant we had a variety to chose from. We chose the most upbeat thrilling one out of the bunch. The other song was made for us by a friend and uploaded onto sound cloud so that we could download and have access to it. As for our SFX, we used a few pre-existent ones that were on the PC, and others we found from websites such as soundbible, freeSFX and freesound. These websites helped us a lot as they were all free and easy to download. There was also a variety of sounds to chose from. Some sounds we wanted to use you had to pay excessive amounts of money so we decided not to use these ones.

9. Construction We filmed our whole trailer with a Canon EOS 600D. This is a very good piece of prosumer equipment as it produces high quality footage and is small enough to take around with you when commuting to different locations. It also has a digital screen so you are able to review and refine footage whilst still out and about. We edited our trailer with Adobe Premiere Pro, this is an efficient programme to use as it can also correct many clips that were not quite right. For example, some of our clips were too bright/too dark so we had to change the brightness and contrast on most of them. With knowledge from last year of how to use the programme this was no challenge for me. We also used the programme for time remapping and speeding up and slowing down our clips. We took screenshots of our progress and uploaded these to the construction part of our blogs to show that this is what we had been doing.

10. Construction We used Photoshop quite regularly during our construction process as it offered most of the things we needed it for. We used it to create our production company logo, posters and magazine covers. We were able to download different fronts off of a website called DaFont. We could then use these in Photoshop. Using Photoshop meant that we could save things in various different formats such as jpegs, pngs and tiffs etc.

11. Evaluation For my evaluation questions I found it easiest to stick to PowerPoint. This was because I feel it is the quickest and most suitable application to use for this purpose. I could easily insert photos from online and my documents. I could also chose different themes to make my PowerPoints look presentable. I used PowerPoint for my evaluation questions 2,3 & 4. As for question 1, we decided to do a directors commentary for that. We felt this was easiest in a way that we could all participate and then upload it to YouTube and embed it to our blogs. For question one we also used a programme which allowed us to record our trailer whilst recording our voices.