Jade Brammah - Critical Evaluation - Question 4

Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

New media technologies have played a very important role in our project this year. Firstly we have hugely relied on the internet to help us with our research. We looked at clips on Youtube for inspiration for our film and used websites such as Shortsbay, Dafont and Soundjay to create effective logos, sound effects for our film and to look at other short films that exist to help us gather information and experience that we could use in our film. We have even used the internet to create our blog which contains all our work and shows the progression we have made throughout the year and the journey we have taken in making our film and the other forms of media that promote it. Without this media tool we would not have an effective portfolio of work and wouldn't have created a film that lives up to the standards that were expected of us. Our posts contain images, videos, quotes and information that has been taken from the internet that were vital to our work. We used eBay to advertise our fake product so that we could take a screenshot of the seller's page and feature this in our film. I also used the social networking site, "Facebook," to gather feedback via comments on an upload of our film that we could take into account and use to make improvements on our film before we released a final export. This helped us to amend certain problems in our film which we may not have noticed ourselves. We had problems exporting our film from Final Cut Express as it seemed to take a substantial amount of time and after this had been achieved we again encountered problems with uploading our film to Youtube as the internet at our college was not compatible with the site.
Since we created our project on Mac computers we used a lot of programs featured on these such as Final Cut Express to edit and create our film and trailer, Garageband to create a radio trailer, Photoshop Elements to create a poster, logo and banner for our trailer, Celtx to write the script, Word to create various documents and the webcam to take pictures of props for our blog posts.

In terms of the physical technology we used, certain pieces of equipment came in handy while creating our final project.  We used a high definition camera to film the actual film and trailer footage while a handheld camera was used to record the video diary. The high definition camera gave us a better picture and a more real image. We used a zoom recorder to record the voice overs in our film and to record sound bites for our radio trailer. We had a few problems with this as often the sound came out quite crackly or muffled and we had to record the extracts again. The camera also proved to be quite a problem as it took a while to get the focus right due to the spinning ring we had to turn that was very sensitive, this meant we had problems when trying to pull focus. It was also a very bulky thing and the tripod was hard to adjust and get even so that the camera filmed a straight scene. Due to the tripod we also encountered problems filming in cramped rooms as we had to balance the camera on our shoulder and try to keep it steady whilst filming; it also wouldn't go low enough for us to film certain scenes so we again had to improvise. Using voice overs and film through using the camera and recorder helped us to create more depth in our film and a more layered effect than last year which meant that it had the potential to look more professional.


Final Cut Express was the most useful media tool we used as it helped us to create our film and trailer. For our trailer we wanted to create banners that would go across the side and bottom of the clip so that it would look like a real QVC style advert. We accomplished this by creating them on Photoshop Elements, importing them onto Final Cut and adding a scrolling text along the bottom and static text at the side. This allowed us to practice our editing skills before tackling our actual film so that we would be more experienced for it and be able to develop our skills. One big thing that featured in both our advert and film was the rewinding of certain clips, we practiced this in our trailer changing the speed to make the clip play backwards. I edited almost the entirety of our trailer which allowed me to gain substantial practice and experience in editing and how to create desired effects that we would later feature in our finished film. A problem I encountered was that not all of the footage was continuous and therefore the positioning was different, I had to alter this by using framewire to change their position to match the rest of the clips. We applied transitions to our film to help it run smoother and chose a fade in because we felt it worked best with the tone of our film. We had to adjust the brightness and colour of our film in certain places as when we looked at it parts were slightly yellow, we added filters to achieve this. Also in parts the music was too loud as it drowned out the speech, so we had to adjust the volume on the music to make it lower and make the voice overs louder.

I used Garageband and Final Cut to create our radiotrailer and extracted specific sound bites from our film to create an idea of what our film is about. I used important points from our film and used the zoom recorder to record a voice over for the beginning and end of the trailer that would introduce the film and let the audience know about its release. I edited the sound bites together to create a smooth running advert and placed the rewinding sound effect from our film in the middle. I then added the music from our film and placed it over the top of the audio to finish it off.

We took photos of our cast using a camera and put them on the Mac, we then used Photoshop to create our poster. We used the lasso tool to cut out the images of our cast and the image of a TV, we then placed the image of our female lead in the TV to create a comedic effect and placed the image of our male lead next to this. We had to re-position the images and enlarge them to make the poster flow more smoothly since we didn't feel it looked right at first, the images looked like cut outs which made it look amateur. We added our title design, logo, certificate rating, distributor, college name, website name and poster credits to make it look official. Finally we featured the names of the cast above their images in the same font to that of our title which tied in the poster nicely.