Wednesday 6 April 2011

Evaluation Question Four

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

RESEARCH
I was able to use sites such as www.channel4.com/programmes/4od  and www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer in order to watch documentaries online when researching existing products: it's easy, the sites are free and you can fit your viewing time to suit your needs. The sites even prompted me too look at 'similar shows' which helped broaden my area of interest.



Search engines such as Google and bing made researching teenage pregnancy significantly easier, as I merely had to type in key words in order to find the information I was looking for. Obtaining statistics was a breeze and Google images helped me narrow the search for posters and advertisements when brainstorming.

CONSTRUCTION

Photoshop and InDesign are cheap, easy to use programs which are available for most PCs, laptops or mac computers, and they produce professional quality print work with ease, if used correctly. I used both programs when creating my products and found the controls easy to use and the effects much more skillful than anything I could have produced on Paint or Publisher. Tutorials for both programs are also available online, which makes them more accessible to everybody.



As copyright is an issue when using music for anything nowadays, programs such as Garageband made life easier when thinking about the soundtrack for my documentary. It was made possible for me to replicate or create my own snippets of songs, either using Garageband's preconstructed riffs or making my own with the keyboard-controlled instruments available.





iMovie, unquestionably, is far more effective than Windows Movie Maker and is quickly becoming very popular when editing any film. It was simple to use and had a much larger range of sound and film effects, fonts and transitions. The quality of the film I produced was much greater than the piece I made at AS level last year, and it was easy to manipulate sound with iMovie - something I had not been able to do with Windows Movie Maker. As I was using this program on a Mac I had the advantage of being able to record some of my voice over using iMovie which allowed me to turn down the sound of a particular clip and up the sound of my voice, instead of having to talk whilst filming over any background noise: this also allowed me to manipulate the people interviewed or filmed, as I could tell them one thing but record another at a later date.


EVALUATION
With widely used sites such as http://www.youtube.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/ available on a daily basis it was much easier to distribute my documentary to a wider audience - YouTube allows people on a worldwide scale to upload videos which may be commented on by just about anyone who uses the site, and unlike Facebook you don't even have to be 'friends' with the person who distributes the clips in order to make comments. This allows for a considerably larger field of feedback than was previously available when neither site existed.


I used Facebook, Slideshare and Vimeo in order to put my documentary out for audiences, both of which were considerably faster ways of gathering feedback than using contact methods as users can view content at any time of day and from the comfort of their own homes.

Also, the whole of my coursework has been publicly distributed online by simply using this site. Worldwide viewers can leave comments on my work or even 'follow' me.

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