Evaluation Question #4

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

Ans) “Technology” had a major role to play in the short film that we made. The software’s as well as the hardware’s that we used were of great help to us in all the stages of our coursework.

Computer:

Computer is nothing new and we all are well aware of how to operate it. We had either the option of using our own laptops or the school’s computer systems. My partner Zainab and I decided that we would use the school systems as we believed that with such heavy files that we were suppose to work with, our laptop’s windows would crash.

In the very beginning we were taught to keep our work either in the D drive or the E drive as saving data on the desktop would corrupt the windows.

Similarly, computer was very important in all the three stages of our coursework. We used the computer systems to surf the internet, plan our projects and once done with shooting edit it.

DSLR cameras:

We used three different camera’s throughout our project. We learned how to adjust the iso, the shutter speed the aperture etc.

Web 2.0:

Internet in today’s society plays a very pivotal role. It is the cause that has enabled the 2 ends to meet. Internet or web 2.0 enabled me to go through the work of former media students. Going through their blogs and work gave me a guideline to follow throughout my project.

Also when in the research stage of my project I went through several websites such as YouTube, Google, Wikipedia, vimeo, weebly etc that all helped me with my research and this would not have been possible if I did not have a connection to the internet.

Similarly, access to blogger would not have been possible without the internet. I can support my statement with the fact that during the cyber attack our work was halted as we could not access the internet which caused a basic delay in our project.

Blogging:

Last year we worked on power point but this year we decided to switch to using blogger instead. Blogger was a very friendly site to use. Being a first time user, it took me no time to get my hands on it.

We were taught how to upload pictures, add videos, make new posts, add label to them and how to add other blogs to your blog list. I found it quite similar to Microsoft word or I would rather say it is a much fancier form of Microsoft word where we can have unique designs for the layout of the page and where we can have a lot more features than we have in Microsoft word or for that matter even in Microsoft power point.

The biggest issue, while using blogger, I faced was with uploading videos. The videos would not upload and as a solution we were taught to first embed the videos that we wanted to upload on some other side and then embed the link to blogger.

Prezi:
This on line presentation tool was very helpful for me. I was able to use different innovative styles for presentation.

Facebook:
Facebook for me always had been a site where i could interact with friends, play games, follow people i like/ i never knew it could be such a helpful platform from which i could reach out to a large audience for my film. I used facebook as a medium through which i got feedback from my audience. My film was able to reach out to a large audience as people kept on sharing my video.

Adobe premier:

This was one software that was of great help. We made the rough cut and the final project using this software. The first look was very scary. Everything seemed so confusing in the start but luckily I managed and the end result was way better than what I had expected.

One basic rule of premier that we were taught was to save our project at location with the most memory. For example, in my system disc drive D had the most memory and I therefore decided to save the project there.

Next we were taught to make a mother folder with the name of our project and in that folder make sub folders of the clips that were to be used, the audio and the stills.

Once we started using adobe premier we were faced with several crashing issues and through this we learned that we should save 3-4 copies of our project at different locations as a backup in case our project was corrupted.

In premier we were taught how to import files, drag them to the time line, use the cut tool, import audio and drag it to the time line. How to add effects and transitions to the audio as well as to the clips.

Exporting the project caused a lot of trouble. As we had shot the whole film using 3 different camera’s, the file would corrupt every time we exported it. As a solution to this our sir recommended us that we shift to adobe premier cs5 as it was a much more advanced form of cs3 and could solve our problem. He was right and we took an export of our film successfully.

Adobe Photoshop:

The movie review page and the poster was made using Photoshop. Using different adjustment tools was really helpful in the construction of these two ancillary task. The use of lasso tool, text tool, crop tool, rectangular tool all proved to be of immense help in making the two.

Proxy sites:

Access to sites like YouTube and daily motion had been denied in Pakistan since the past few months due to some Religious issues. This had put a stop to our work for some time as we could not continue without taking references from YouTube. In this way we discovered some proxies like hotspot shield and spot flux.

Smart phones:

At times when there was a power cut, I used my HTC smart phone to access the internet and blog my recent activities, even at places where I did not have access to my computer system, my mobile phone was of great help.

Similarly, it was also used for recording audio clips. Its quality was really good and it eliminated our need to use a collar mic.