Evaluation Part 4 - Keira

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

I feel I have developed my skills in all areas of digital technology in the foundation portfolio, as more practise has allowed me to improve and use the tools more effectively.

Camera

I am now far more confident using a camera as I did more of the filming for this project that the foundation portfolio, and have learnt how to set the white balance, brightness and contrast, manual focus, record and playback on an entirely different camera (HD). The ability to change focus on this camera was particularly useful for certain shots, when at times we wanted a sharper or softer image. We also used it in a similar way to 'The Space Between Us', to create a raw and innocent atmosphere when one of our shots (in Kate's bedroom) starts out of focus and comes in, revealing her sitting on the bed:

Editing

I also feel more confident using final cut pro, and have learned how to control it properly. In the foundation portfolio we used iMovie to edit, so having now been trained in both I feel more able to switch between the two depending on what the project requires. This also makes the editing process much speedier and efficient as I don’t have to constantly ask how to perform certain tasks or what certain tools do. The skills I have specifically learnt in Final Cut are how to put in effects such as fades and dissolves, how to write titles and how to make shots fade up or down, all of which I didn’t know before and have made our film flow much more smoothly.

A particular difficulty was with the sound editing, with which we kept transferring back and forth from Final Cut to Garage Band, because we'd realise there was something extra that needed to be added or cut out etc. However the process has helped me become far more confident with that also, as this was the first time I had used Garage Band and had to be taught as we went along. But 

by the end I was confident, and successfully recorded Carl's guitar and the voiceovers and transferred them onto the programme without too much trouble. I also used a tape recorder to plug my iPod into, on which I had saved the sound from an episode of 'Gavin and Stacey' (for the end scene when the couple are watching the TV) and then transferred that sound across to the Mac to edit the bits we wanted into the right place. Being able to alter the volume levels was consistently useful as sometimes parts of the backing music overpowered the voice over and needed to go down slightly, and at the end the sound from the TV gets louder to suggest that it echoes the characters thoughts (we specifically chose a part which was highly relevant to the moment in the film).

Research and Planning

Having had more practise with Blogger, I can now more easily insert images and videos without help, which helps to make the blog more of a multi-media platform rather than just continuous essay writing. It has been useful to use this to demonstrate the research and planning that went in to our piece, because it means I can pick out specific references to shots with screen grabs and videos to illustrate my points and allow me to talk about them in more detail.

I used sites such as Youtube, BBC shorts and Virgin Media shorts to watch the short films for research, and used the print screen keyboard button (then pasting it into paint and saving it as a bmp. image) to get stills for my evaluation of these films. With more practise this process became faster and my navigation of these sites improved.

In the planning process, we took still photographs of the locations we'd use (for example, the loft of Tom's house and the college smoking area):

For these photos we used a digital camera borrowed from the media department, from which we downloaded the photos via a USB connection and saved them onto our college J-drive (and from this we were able to put them on the blog).

We also made an animatic storyboard, for which we used a Mini DV camera:

This produces worse quality moving image videos than the HD camera which we used for the actual film, but we felt this didn't matter as the animatic is more of a brief outline of how the finished product will run and therefore doesn't need to be expertly done. We edited this together in final cut pro and put in some diegetic sounds (such as birds and a kiss) to help get a general feel for the film. When it came to the actual filming, we had a better sense of the chronological order in which the shots should be filmed due to the animatic, and also knew roughly how long each shot should be. I also made a shot list (written on Microsoft Word) which we took to every filming session to ensure we didn't miss anything out.

Ancillary Tasks

For the review I used a combination of InDesign (for the layout and overall structure) and Photoshop (for the more fiddly parts such as the title and the 'Alice In Wonderland' images). Before this coursework I had not had much experience with InDesign, but it soon became clear after playing around for a while. I first created the template for where the image, copy and title boxes would go, which looked like this:

We then used Photoshop to create the Tweedle Dum and Cards, by taking the images from the internet, cutting and manipulating them using the freeform tools and paintbucket and colour-replace to change the colours on the cards to orange and green (so they matched the text boxes, which I also created on Photoshop). I then saved that file and re-opened it in InDesign, where me and Adam pasted the copy of the review from Microsoft Word into the text boxes I'd created and formatted them so they fit to the four columns. It was then a case of refining the final details (such as inserting a page number and the numbers for the scores of the Anticipation / Enjoyment / In Retrospect sections, which we pasted as new layers and sized.

As a small extra task to help format the review, I created a possible cover for the issue of 'Little White Lies' in which our film would appear.

For this I used Photoshop. I used google image to find the image of Johnny Depp's mad hatter from Tim Burton's 'Alice In Wonderland', which at the time was the current blockbuster. I used the 'fresco' tool in image > adjustments in photoshop to make it more cartoon-like (to fit with the other covers of 'Little White Lies' i've seen) then put the contrast up slightly to make it stand out more. I then got the LWL logo from google images, pasted it into photoshop and cut it out, then pasted it as a new layer onto my image. I put it on his hat as it fit nicely and was in the centre of the page. I then used the paintbrush tool to write 'The Alice In Wonderland Issue' as I didn't want to use any of the standard photoshop fonts I'd seen. I finished by placing a small barcode in the bottom right hand corner for authenticity. Creating this helped develop my skills so that they were better when it came to making the actual review.

For my draft posters, again, I used Photoshop entirely. I got the image (one of which was a screen grab I'd got from the editing in final cut pro, the other was a still we'd taken on the first filming session of the couple sitting on the sofa). I used the shift keyboard button when I expanded the images to fit them to A4 size so that the width to length ratio didn't change and the photo become wonky. I then changed the brightness and contrast to try and make the image a bit clearer. For the image right, however, this was more difficult as it is of a much lower resolution than a proper photo. The text was done with the text tool, and I spent a while choosing what I believed to be the most appropriate font. I settled for a fairly simple one, with white writing, as I thought it would best represent the reality that social realism tries to communicate.

Dom and Arran also used Photoshop for the final poster, and they used similar tools as I did. Although they selected the entire image apart from Kate and desaturated it and also used the colour replace tool to change the bricks in the background to the same red as Kate's scarf, as with the title.

Gaining Feedback

To get evaluative comments on our film and poster, we decided to use social networking site Facebook. We did this because our target audience is 16-24, and most users of facebook are in this age bracket. It was also a good base to get comments, due to the sheer volume of members. Here are some facts from October 2009 about Facebook:

 •"Each day, people around the world spend more than six billion minutes on Facebook, where they post 40 million status updates and become fans of 10 million pages."

•"In a little more than nine months, Facebook has managed to grow its user base from 150 million active members to 300 million."

These kind of figures clearly demonstrate how popular the site is, and what a good tool it can be used as to advertise or spread word about media products. We created a Facebook group which we invited people to join, which held a discussion about what we should title our film (whether it would be 'Shit' or 'Three Words') and where we posted our video so people could comment. View this page here. We then also posted the video on our individual profile pages and asked people to comment:

We found this a highly successful platform for recieving feedback as we could post it as many times as we wanted to keep asking for more comments.

I have learnt alot about a variety of new media technologies from this project, which I hope is evident in the work we've produced as a group and what I've done individually.