How did you use new media

technologies in the construction and

research, planning and evaluation
stages?
 Cameras
To film our soap opera trailer, we used 3 Samsung
video cameras and we found them very easy and
efficient to use. I particularly liked how strong the zoom
was and that even when zooming the camera focused
very well. The cameras picked up sound very well and
when playing back the footage on the camera we
found it to be very clear. The screen on the camera
rotated so we could have the camera at any angle and
be able to watch what it was recording clearly. We
found that using 3 cameras saved us time as we could
record each scene from 3 different angles enabling us
with more options when it came to editing the footage.
The only real problems we had with the cameras was
the fact that the battery life wasn’t very long and they
took a long time to be fully charged. We had 4gb SD
memory cards in each camera and this was very
useful to have so much memory as we had filmed
quite a lot.
 Tripods
We mainly used tripods to steady our cameras and stable
them to ensure we didn’t have any shaky shots. We also
used them to create different camera angles without
having a shaky shot because it was handheld. I found
using tripods very useful as they can adjust and extend to
any height which is useful as you can create virtually any
camera shot and keep it steady. The tripods can also be
moved at the top which makes it very easy to pan the
camera around and to create even better camera angles.
The only problem I had with the tripod was that is was
often hard to keep them out of the other cameras view as
they are quite big.
 I Movie
When it came to editing our footage, we uploaded our videos
onto the Mac in an editing program called I Movie. We found
that this was very quick and easy to arrange our work, we had
previously used Adobe Premier Elements and we found that
compared to Adobe, I Movie was much quicker to cut and crop
clips and saved us a lot of time. We particularly liked the variety
of songs and sound effects that were available on the program
and we found this very efficient when adding extra diegetic and
non-diegetic sound. It was also very easy to add transitions
which made the trailer flow better, considering we had never
used the program before we found that we made a good quality
video relatively quickly. We also used I Movie to create our
photographic and animatic storyboards, it was very easy to
arrange the photos onto a timeline and then do a voiceover
exactly over each photo. Being able to record sound just by
talking into the microphone which was already installed onto the
Mac was particularly easy as in previous tasks we had to record
sound in a microphone and add the sound separately and this
was often tricky as the audio didn’t always stay where we
wanted it to on the timeline. We didn’t experience any problems
when using I Movie and found it a very quick and efficient
program to use and I would continue to use it in any future
projects.
 Blogger
We mainly used Blogger.com to upload our work and present our
work neatly. I had used it in previous projects and I found that it
is an excellent way to present my work in order and I can
arrange my work in order of how I started my project, researched
into the history of soap operas and then the planning stages it
took to complete the final project. It is easy to arrange the posts
in date order and you can even do this with posts added at a
later date, this was very useful as after receiving feedback on my
blog and how I can improve it was easy to add any research or
planning projects that I may of missed or needed to improve the
quality of my work. I found it very efficient that I could embed
documents from Youtube and Scribd and Blogger displays this
work instantly. I also found it very efficient that I could add
images and videos straight from my documents to put onto the
blog and as well as a HTML option, you could compose work
easily how you would using Microsoft Word an it was easy to
underline or make any words bold. The only problems I
experienced when using Blogger was that the images uploaded
would often get moved around when it came to publishing the
work and this was frustrating as it looked untidy. To overcome
this I created most of my work involving images in Word. I also
had problems uploading videos straight from my documents as it
was quite slow and to over come this I uploaded the videos onto
Youtube then embedded them onto Blogger.
 Scribd
I found Scribd.com a very helpful to my project as it
was quick and easy to upload work and then embed it
straight onto our blog. We mainly used Scribd to
upload word documents and power points that could
be embedded onto our blogs. I found this very useful
as I often had to add pictures on word documents so
that they stayed in the correct place and after
uploading these word documents to Scribd I could
embed them straight to Blogger. We were unable to
create tables in Blogger so it was easier to create a
word document and then upload it onto Scribd.
Although Scribd was very useful to uploading work, I
experienced a few problems. The main problem was
when after uploading word documents, the images and
tables on the page were all unarranged after
publishing the work. To overcome this problem I
converted the word documents into a PDF.
 Web 2.0
We made a good use of Web 2.0 throughout the project,
particularly Google to research into the history of soap
operas and to find examples of soap opera magazines
and posters. We used a website called BARB to research
the soap opera viewings and used this to figure out what
was the most popular soap opera and how soaps were
favoured over TV Dramas, it also helped us to see what
storylines where the most popular and how we could use
these popular storylines in our own soap opera. As our
target audience mainly consisted of young adults in
Category D and E, we mainly got our inspiration from
Hollyoaks and Eastenders and found the soaps’ websites
to be very helpful when researching the soap and its
trailers.
 Facebook
We mainly used Facebook.com to communicate
with our actors and actresses and organise our
filming sessions. As our entire cast and crew had
Facebook, we were able to communicate with
everybody via a mass message sent to every
member. Each member was able to reply on this
message privately and publicly so that the other
members could see, this was very useful as we all
found it difficult to organise things face to face as
we all had conflicting timetables. We were also
able to send each individual actor or actress as
message of what time they would be needed for
filming and what they would need to bring with
them for their costume. I particularly liked using
Facebook as we could all communicate together
without any stress of trying to get all of our cast
and crew together at any one time to organise
filming.
 Youtube
Without Youtube.com, we would be unable to watch
other soap opera trailers from existing soaps and we
would also be unable to upload our own soap opera
trailers to Youtube for feedback and so that our target
audience could view them. Youtube was very helpful to
us as after creating a draft trailer we uploaded the trailer
to Youtube and our audience gave us feedback on what
was good and how we could improve. We also used
Youtube to watch the Virgin Atlantic trailer so that we
could analyse it and we were also able to watch the last
year’s media students’ work. Youtube is very quick at
uploading our videos and after they were uploaded we
could embed them straight onto our blog. We were
particularly pleased with the amount and variety of real
soap opera trailers that were available to us and we
were able to use some of these for inspiration.
 Photoshop
We each created our soap opera magazine and our soap
opera poster. I created both my poster and magazine in Adobe
Photoshop CS5 and I found this program very easy to use as I
could add all of my images and text as separate layers and
move them all separately so they could overlap how I wanted
them to. After receiving feedback on my draft magazine, I was
advised to re-arrange a few things, this was particularly easy
as I had already created every image and piece of text as a
separate layer.
 Microsoft Office
I mainly used Microsoft Word to arrange present my work with
images neatly as it was harder to do this on Blogger. I also used
it when doing my soap opera magazine and poster analysis’, I
found that it was very easy to arrange and move images exactly
where I wanted to and then add text exactly where I wanted to. I
particularly found it interesting that when doing my analysis’ as I
could add arrows from each text box to what part of the
magazine or poster I was writing about and as I had so much to
write I had trouble fitting it all in so the arrows were very useful.
I have mainly used Microsoft Power Point for evaluation
questions and this is very efficient as I can do one slide per
topic.