Evaluation - Question 4

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

• As mentioned in detail on a previous blog post, we used Final Cut Pro as opposed to iMovie for this year's coursework. This new media technology fit in seamlessly with what we were trying to achieve. This was used in the construction and also the planning stages of our video. We used it to edit our movie, and to create our plan visually, our plan being the animatic. Final Cut Pro was overall a better model than iMovie, as it was more detailed when it came to editing colour, and without it we wouldn't have been able to create our fast-paced edit towards the end.
  
• Final Cut Pro was however not without its problems. By having so many options there were many aspects we struggled to find, such as the correct editing effect. But I guess its better to have too many options than not enough! Lip syncing was also a difficult thing to achieve with the group re-aligning clips 2 or 3 times to make it perfect, but we would also have faced this problem with iMovie, its just an inevitability of the editing process.

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  Used to show all of the stages stated in the question was Blogger. Blogger has been an extremely useful tool for us, compared with 'Moodle' (Weston College's Virtual Learning Centre) from last year.
• With Blogger, we could update all the stages of our coursework as and when they happened, and it's easily accessible both at home and at college.
• Blogger is alot more technical than Moodle, it enabled us to upload images, embed videos from YouTube and link to our tutor's (and consequently eachother's) blogs easily. It's a very convienient website and it worked very well for myself.
  
• Blogger also made it easy to access our previous blogs, so we could look back over what we've done with ease.

• Adobe Photoshop was a new edition to coursework this year. Although we didn't use it in our AS year, all of us had some varying degrees of experience with Photoshop, so we all knew what we were doing. This was mainly used in the construction stage, for the ancillary texts; the magazine advert and the DigiPak. The photoshop I was used to was Adobe Photoshop cs2, and I thought that was brilliant, but if I thought cs2 was brilliant, cs4 was so much better. It gave us the ability to enhance any image and it had so many more options.
  
• Overall, I was extremely happy with Photoshop and the end product it gave us via editing colours, lighting and the contrast.
  
• Photoshop also has a text feature, with a lot of fonts and this was good for variety.