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

2. Research Stage YouTube was extremely useful for my research. When it came to looking at typical trailer conventions, analysing trailers or just generally looking at films YouTube was a massive help. With thousands of trailers on YouTube, there was a wide variety of trailers to choose from and get inspiration from. When it came to analysing trailers it was very easy as you could pause rewind or fast forward and also pause and take screenshots of important parts of the trailer. Google was also really helpful in the research stage. The main reason being it had a vast amount of resources on it, and as soon as I searched something so many results came up it made it much easier for me to find what I needed. Web 2.0 is a massive part of the world today, and without search engines like Google I would have found it very difficult to do the in depth research that I did.

3. Planning Stage For the planning stage we mostly used Microsoft word. The reason for this, is because it was very easy to fill out documents such as the shooting schedule, shot list and the risk assessment. These are all vital planning documents and Word made it so much easier. All we would do is get the forms online, then we would fill them out using word. After, we would then print some off and screenshot it to upload to our blog. Without Word in the planning stage it would have been a lot harder to efficiently fill out all the necessary documents we were required to fill out. Quack blog was also very important in the planning stage. It allowed us to put all our planning documents in one place, and we could gain feedback from the teachers if anything needed to be improved.

4. Google drive was very important in the planning stage as it allowed me and my other group member Joe, share documents between each other. We could share all our planning documents between each other, and both make changes if we thought it was necessary. Google drive was very effective and allowed us to work on documents together. Dystopianmovies.org was a brilliant website I used throughout creating our trailer. I particularly used the website when doing my research task which was to create a dystopian timeline, because it had a brilliant timeline on the site. Additionally, I also used the site to find other dystopian films and we found some of our influences on that site such as Blade Runner.

5. Production For the production of our trailer, we used a Canon EOS 600D. This is a high tech piece of equipment and it enabled us to film our trailers at a high quality. Furthermore, we used other pieces of equipment such as a 40mm lens to help us do focus pulls, which was a big element of our film. After we finished filming our trailer we had to upload it onto a computer and begin editing on a software called premiere pro. This software was really helpful as it allowed us to put our footage in a timeline, then cut it, fix the volume, put a soundtrack and voiceover in and many other things. Adobe premiere pro was a big part of why we were able to make our trailer look as professional as possible. We used Adobe Photoshop to make our magazines and posters. It was great because it allowed us to work in layers which made everything easier. Adobe Photoshop gave our posters and magazine covers a professional look, which is exactly what we wanted and without it we could not have made such great posters and magazine covers.

6. Post Production DaFont.com was used to find fonts for our trailer. It is a completely free site, so that was very useful as well as their wide range of fonts to choose from. Additionally, the search option on the site was good because it made easier to find fonts by just typing in one key word. For example, we typed in the word ‘futuristic’ and a range of fonts came up and we scrolled through till we found one we liked. We used incompetech to find a soundtrack for our trailer. Just like Dafont it is a completely free site and the soundtracks are not copyrighted which was exactly what we were looking for. Furthermore, to search soundtracks you would put key words in such as ‘unnerving’ and ‘suspenseful’. Once we searched for while we found a soundtrack that was perfect for our trailer. We used free SFX to find sound effects for our trailer. The site had thousands of sound effects to chose from and that gave us a lot of variety. In the end we managed to find some good sound effects that we thought, improved our trailer.

7. Evaluation PowerPoint was an extremely useful tool when it came to presenting my work in a good and interactive way. I could efficiently present my work alongside pictures, links to videos etc. and I hope that it will be more interactive and interesting for the person looking at my blog. We used the blogging site quack blog to put all are information on. Everything from research, planning, production and evaluation went on our blogs. The site was very useful as we could get feedback from other members in our group and our media teacher as we were progressing our project.

8. Feedback We used social networking sites like the ones above to get feedback on our trailer. For example, on YouTube we looked at how many likes and views our trailer had got. Social networking is an easy way to find out peoples opinions as you can reach a large audience with just a click of a button, and people tend to be more critical when on social networking as they are not there face to face with you.