Lewis Brookes: Evaluation Question Four

ESSAY and DIAGRAM

4) How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
a) How did digital technology enable you to develop creatively and are there examples of the technology obstructing or preventing your creativity?

I used several new media technologies such as, a iMac apple computer, the internet, YouTube, a DVD player, Facebook, blogger, script making software Celtx, a digital camera, final cut express, a voice recorder,  free copyright music CD’s, a flash camera, radio making software, and Photoshop. This software helped me to develop my creativity in my research, planning, construction and evaluation stages of my project. I did come across some problems with this digital technology but I eventually overcame these issues allowing me to develop my initiative and understanding of these products further.

Firstly, I undertook much research to give me inspiration for my groups film, however to help me accomplish this I needed assistance from media software much like, the iMac PC. This helped me to purse not only my research but my creativity within all aspects of this project. This included multi-media programs on the PC like Celtx, YouTube, Facebook, Photoshop and the newest editing software Final Cut Express. This inspired me to develop my creativity from the start, as it allowed me to use many of the different programs that were already available on the PC. The iMac has also made me more aware of the wide variety of media software you can use to help produce something excellent. Furthermore the PC has learnt me different ways of using a computer such as copying and pasting links





under the edit toolbar and taking screenshots by holding down the apple, shift and ‘4’ key.  Also it helped us with the construction for our project. We tried to bring more creativity by creating our own music however after little success on this and the internet, we inserted free copyright music CD’s into the iMac computer. An obstacle to this was limited help from the secondary sources and the CD’s would not always be accessible in the PC. So to overcome this we had to stay consistent in our search.

The iMac PC helped me with my research greatly by allowing me to surf the web online with a much unheard internet provider known to me, named Safari. This increased by knowledge of other media companies instead of using an obvious choice, say, internet explorer. Having used a diverse number of multi-media search

engines like ‘Google’ and ‘Yahoo!’ the internet allowed me to help me get creative through the different ideas and genres I discovered upon it for our film. I would say this hindered our creativity slightly with sometimes blocked web addresses and a slow web connection. To overcome this obstruction I had to stay consistent and patient with my search. When we decided the genre of our movie the internet allowed me to access a variety of sites to research different examples of what a psychological thriller should look like E.G.: camera shots and music, giving me imagination for our own.
www.youtube.com
One of the sites that greatly assisted me with this was YouTube. (www.youtube.com) The website has many videos on the same genre which gave me creativity and countless ideas by analyzing the mise-en-scene, lighting, diagetic and non diagetic sound for example of different short thrillers. YouTube also gave me creative ideas on how the credits of a film should be set out; how tense opening title sequences should look and how our theatrical poster should be represented to our audience. The one prevention I had with YouTube was that when I wanted to embed a video to show the footage easier, it may sometimes have been disabled or faulty. So to overcome this I notified the provider of the clip to allow me to use the link or if I wasn’t allowed I could at least use the URL link.

Digital technology of a Blue-ray DVD player let me continue my own research further by looking at my own films. This gave me more inspiration and creativity by watching different aspects of a thriller. The DVD player allowed me to take notes on interesting features within the film by playing in slow motion, pausing and re-winding to important, influential scenes.  The DVD ‘Black Swan’ also gave me knowledge of the reasoning behind different non-diagetic music and shots through audio commentary.

Lastly, the social networking website helped me to find out what the public would like a psychological thriller to show to our audience. For example, the music, a twist in the plot, how the characters should be represented. This gave me creativity to create our characters personalities to really make them connect with our target audience.  This universal website gave me great creativity from a wide variety of people from age, sex, race and religion etc. A problem I came across from this piece of media is perhaps the views from people on the site ranged that much, it was hard to please and accommodate everyone’s input.
www.blogger.com

I had much technology and software to help me with the planning stage of our media production. The multi-media website blogger (www.blogger.com) helped me to organize my work and help our film come to life. It allowed me to input multi-media products such as images, videos and audio to make my ideas more creative and exciting. Blogger gave me opportunities to share my creativity with other groups so we could give each other inspiration. However to all the positives this format gave me there were a few issues with the site. One was the fact that recently the sites layout and design had changed making me adjust very quickly to using the technology. But this improved my creativity on using a different layout. Second to this was that the Blog would sometimes not let me publish or save by posts, both of these hindrances caused delays. Therefore I had to stay consistent with my hard work and patience throughout. Another problem was that the images and videos I published would not display in the correct places on the page, therefore making posts difficult to edit. This obstructed my creativity to what I wanted to display on the blog, so to overcome this I would sometimes describe my ideas in more detail. In all, this media software allowed me to express my creativity thoroughly through different media formats, fonts, and bright colours.

To help me create and plan our film further we used the script making software Celtx. I got creative with this technology by using a clearly displayed layout (with titles, type of speech, dialogue and stage directions) to easily show our actors how they were betraying their characters. It gave me several creative thoughts on the effective ways our characters could connect with our audience through a dramatic script. To help me get more creative this media technology simply allowed me to create a tense plot by allowing me to express my ideas with no boundaries. This software also helped us to create a tense radio trailer for the construction of our movie by using a similar format. Therefore Celtx helped us greatly to plan our creative ideas within different aspects of the media. This didn’t prevent my creativity it only expanded it.

To start the construction of our film we used a digital camera to capture all the action in HD. We filmed various shots enabling us to get creative by establishing
medium, long, and many close-ups to bring our creativity forward. A few hindrances we had were the size and heaviness of the camera. We found it difficult to maneuver the filming equipment to each location. Also some shots we produced were not very professional such as panning, due to the difficulty of steadily moving the camera. We eventually got through this with practice. Another aspect we found tricky to get right was to get the white balance on the camera clear to start filming. We had to redo many shots due to the lens showing different shades of colour.  The real lens on the lens would often keep spinning rather than stay linear to keep our shots focused therefore we had to make sure we kept our camera movement steady. One of the biggest problems we had to overcome was making sure our locations had enough light in the rooms to make sure our shots weren’t too dark. We had to spend much time re-filming some scenes and borrowed some lighting equipment to overcome this obstacle. In all, the digital camera allowed us much creativity by exploring different shots and brought our film to life.

After filming we used editing software of the newest version, Final Cut Express. This allowed me to get creative through basically, breaking our footage apart and placing the pieces back together again to make our film look the very best to our audience. This media technology also gave us the opportunity to get creative by speeding up the footage to make the shots tenser and cross cutting the shots to give the viewer more excitement and a sense of insecurity. This software gave me the chance to express my creativity with different features within this program, such as adding coloured filters and sound effects to create a strong empowering film. The only obstacle we had is that we accidently shot some footage in DV (digital video) so this wouldn’t display in the software. Therefore we had to re-film the footage. This broadened my creativity with editing resources by learning new skills and how to use many techniques within the software.

We also used digital sound recording equipment (zoom recorder) to produce the voice over narration speech throughout our film. This gave me creativity by using new media technology for the first time and to try something different. I learnt how to use this software and how to connect with our audience through the timing and tone of Andrews’s speech. One obstruction we did have was that sometimes the quality of the sound was sometimes not clear so we had to swap the equipment.

After taking photos with a Canon flash camera, Photoshop was then a great influence for my creativity by developing two theatrical film posters. This allowed me to use many different editing features on these photos such as, bold text, retouch techniques, light effects, and colour effects to draw make the final product draw instant attention. It gave me creativity to use programs I knew very little and developed my knowledge of media software.
Another product of media technology that helped me get creative with my work was the zoom recorder to help create our radio trailer and Garageband. This gave me creativity by creating a tense voice-over and placing sound effects and key moments from the film to create an appealing trailer.

Lastly social networking websites like YouTube and Facebook has helped me to get feedback on the evaluation of my work. This allowed the viewer to give me positive and negative feedback on my work and therefore use this for my own creativity to make changes. These two accessible websites meant it would be easy to spread the release of the film by mouth-to-mouth communication and by sending friends a quick link. YouTube website gave me a better idea of the films success with a comparison between the like and dislike button. Also an advantage by using YouTube is that this gave me wider feedback than from only the people I know on Facebook. I was also able to use the multi-media website blogger to show peoples views by creatively posting videos, links and screenshots.
In conclusion all the new media technology available to me allowed me to express my creativity in many ways from using an iMac PC to research different films to a digital HD camera to construct our own. Software such as Celtx and Photoshop has given me the opportunity to discover different aspects in how to create media also. The obstacles placed in front of me did prevent parts of our project to be put on hold, or encourage more hard work and patience but I seem to have overcome this with help from my team mate. In all, I feel as though this technology has brought out the creativity and ideas within me to develop a project to the best of my ability.