Evaluation (4) - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The use of multiple and inter-operative platforms and technologies was essential to all aspects of our work.

Blogger was crucial to the development of our tasks from start to finish.

It allowed us to publish our work publicly for evaluation from the rest of the group, and indeed class.

It proved invaluable for a collaborative work tool.

Google is a very powerful search engine and proved inessential to our research.

Using it, we were able to find appropriate research resources for the genre and look at existing texts.

It also enabled us to find images, sounds, videos, and other ideas for use or inspiration when constructing our piece.

YouTube is a social networking platform driven by user-generated content.

It hosted many of the trailers and existing A-level texts that we used for research.

I uploaded our trailer there and this opened up opportunities for feedback.

Crucial to our poster and magazine cover designs were Adobe's Photoshop and InDesign. Photoshop allowed us to manipulate images to suit our products, while InDesign allowed us to block elements and create the actual product layouts.

We used Dafont.com to find creative typefaces for use in our tasks.

The fonts there tend to be licensed under Creative Commons, and as such are free to use in our situation.

They tend to also be much more specialised than the fonts one would typically find in Microsoft Windows or when using Adobe's Creative Suite.

We used Serif MoviePlus v5 for editing our trailer. Though not very feature-rich and not as flexible as industry standard software such as Sony Vegas, it proved sufficient for most of our needs. We created the elevator CCTV effect using this software, and all the transitions as well as sound effects were applied with it. We used it to reduce ambient sound and apply gunshot sounds.

Also crucial to our tasks, were the obvious video camera and digital camera. We had reliable hardware that meant we could film all our shots several times as well as take pictures for our ancillary tasks and document our progress using our digital camera.

Facebook was also a very helpful platform. It proved invaluable for receiving audience feedback and promoting our work. It also allowed the members of our group to collaborate and communicate using a variety of mediums, including text, sound, and video.