How did you use media technologies in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
During our Media Studies assignment, we utilised many different technologies
in order to help us accomplish our task.
These came in varying types of specialty and complexity, but all were
invaluable in some way throughout the project.
For both the planning and evaluation sides, we needed to survey our
target audience in order to get their opinions and feedback on various aspects
of our production. Due to us both not
knowing particularly many members of our target audience, we reached out to our
target audience using various forms of new media to ask people who we may not
physically know for their assistance and opinions. We utilised Twitter and
Facebook for this task by sending out the link to our target audience surveys
and politely asking our friends and followers to answer them for us. The responses from both services, Twitter
especially, actually ended up constituting much of our Target Audience
research. In short, it was invaluable.
In order to film the
documentary, we had to use various video cameras from our college’s Media
Studies department. These recorded onto
rewind-able and re-usable tapes and not digital SD cards, due to the college
not owning a single one of those types of cameras. This did make the subsequent capturing and
editing of footage in post-production difficult, due to us being unable to
simply go back and record over our mistakes (tape audio/video has a habit of
going out of sync when that happens); but we managed to make it work by being
extra careful when the time came.
Filming required very
little technology, save for the set-dressing of some turned on, video-playing
computers in the background of some shots (specifically, this one). The interview problems have been documented
in a prior blog post. Most of the media technology used
comes from post-production and editing.
In order to record the
respective voice overs for our hosts, we made use of Garageband and its ability
to record podcasts. This program
gave us high quality recordings exported in a large bitrate with minimal loss
or distortion, which was perfect for our documentary.
Acquiring the file footage was done by installing an application called
YouTube Downloader. This enabled me to
download videos required to make up the file footage in whatever quality and
format I desired straight from YouTube.
The program was extremely helpful as none of the personal computers we
had were powerful enough to run a YouTube video and some screen capture
software at the same time.
The editing portion of the production came from the usage of Final Cut
Express. This video editing software was
where the random pieces of footage, audio recordings, presenter links and
awkward interview subjects came together to become an actual, watchable
documentary. We both learnt how to dub
in narration, create fancy transitions, manipulate text to get the type of
motion that we were looking for, how to adjust audio levels so that music
wouldn’t drown out important audio, how to insert file footage over presenter
footage, how to craft our title sequence (short sharp and specific rhythms of
text) and much more. It was a long,
painful process, but our documentary would not be of the quality that it is
without it.
Whilst on the subject, we also used Final Cut Express to craft the
Director’s Commentary in the evaluation.
Quicktime was used for recording the audio (via the Audio Recording
option as we were not able to acquire a machine with Garageband on it in time),
but we utilised Final Cut to match everything up. This involved cutting all of the audio tracks
and replacing them with mine and Kyle’s commentary on proceedings. Due to some topics and sections running long,
I had to occasionally “pause” the documentary, a freeze-frame of a random
section, in order to keep everything running relatively to time. Using these techniques were far better than
simply, say, physically recording us watching and talking over the documentary
as it allowed us multiple takes to talk about what we needed to talk about,
gave us a chance to edit out major mistakes in post, and meant that there was
no awkward dead air during the commentary.
For the construction of our ancillary tasks, we made use of Adobe
Photoshop to create them. We were both
familiar with Photoshop after having used it for our Foundation Portfolio last
year and so creating our ancillaries ended up being really easy; compared to
most of the other programs we had to make use of during the project, at
least. In addition, I held a photoshoot
for my Double Page Spread piece with a digital camera borrowed from the Media department. It had a very limited range of options but it
managed to take pictures perfectly fine and captured the image used for the
ancillary, so I would say that it did its job well.
When it came time to get evaluative opinions on our documentary, in
addition to the standard practice of creating a collection of paper surveys and
distributing them to a room full of willing volunteers after they have viewed
our documentary, Kyle decided to upload the documentary onto his YouTube
channel in order to give it greater exposure and for the chance for some extra
feedback. Sadly, this did not work out
as expected. Specifically, nobody gave
us any feedback. We received no comments
and no likes or dislikes. I’ve chosen to
take this as a positive action, as no criticism gives me the chance to believe
that nobody had major problems with the documentary. Also, we both have had many bad experiences
with YouTube commenters in the past, so the chances of us having gotten some
constructive feedback were extremely unlikely, anyway.
We had also used YouTube previously for our Similar Product Research
during the planning phase. This simply
involved us watching footage of gaming documentaries that we had discovered and
seeing what documentary conventions those programs stuck to, how they presented
their information and how much we wanted to follow or break their style for
ourselves. YouTube was extremely helpful
with this task thanks to the lack of documentaries on the subject (and, in
fact, in general) being available on DVD for us to watch. The Internet was the only way to be able to
watch these shows and without such a well-laid out and comprehensive service as
YouTube, it may have taken a literal age to find them.
As we were going about our process, we documented all of our progress
via a free blog service called Blogger.
We set it up at the very beginning of the project and posted all of our
work, research and updates onto there as they happened. This not only created a singular hub to be
able to store every single piece of work onto for easy access and archiving, it
also gave our teacher a place to provide up-to-the-second marking. We could get feedback on each piece of work
as soon as it was done and then improve upon it from the advice we got. I feel, personally, that it was possibly the
most important non-filmmaking piece of technology we used throughout the entirety
of the project.
Finally, we utilised SlideShare for the posting of Presentations onto the
blog. Though Blogger is a free service,
that also came with the caveat that it was lacking in features; one of which
being the ability to directly upload Presentations into posts. This made it impossible to answer evaluation
question number three unless we found a workaround. Fortunately, we discovered SlideShare, which
enabled us to simply upload the file onto their server (after creating an
account) and then posting the requisite link to the blog post. This was a late addition to our list, but one
that would have caused us to fail the evaluation if it didn’t exist.
