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

From the beginning of the year (September) we have been using many different media technologies for our research, planning and evaluation. During my research I was researching film trailers as this is what I was going to be producing, we were going to be following the codes and conventions of a horror genre, for my research I used the internet to watch many film trailers, I researched ones such as ‘SAW’ and ‘The Wrangler’. When I had found the ones I was researching I watched them over and over again and took notes about the effects that they used and why they were effective. The ancillary texts for this project were a front cover of a magazine and poster, I began my research for these, however when I was half-way through my partner dropped out and I joined Greg. Greg had already chose his band and had done a lot of research, as I joined at the beginning of the planning stage it meant I was researching and planning at the same time which meant that I didn’t get a lot of research done however I was familiar with music videos, magazine adverts and front covers for the genre. We began planning, we downloaded a storyboard template which helped us to make our storyboard, and we then discussed the different ideas for things to include in our advanced portfolio. Whilst doing this we had to be thinking about the print products, as I was not familiar with Adobe Photoshop yet, I used publisher as I was familiar with this software as it is very easy to use. After we had decided on a basic layout to use I began teaching myself how to use Photoshop, we found the font that we wanted to use for the band name ‘Pulled Apart by Horses’ and I used the ‘magic wand’ tool which allowed me to select the text without the background being included, I then changed the colour of this to suit the different backgrounds that we had tried. At this point the red and black colour scheme hadn’t been decided yet. I firstly chose black as I thought it was quite a sinister colour and would reflect the nature of the band due to its connotations however this proved to look quite plain and not very professional, after many trials and errors we decided on a red and black gradient with an image in the middle. When producing the music video we used Adobe Premiere Pro, I filmed the whole video as Greg starred in it, I had to improve my camera skills as I hadn’t used it a lot last year as I was in the opening sequence. To do this I refreshed my memory on the different camera shots that we could use and looked over the storyboard. We then used Adobe Premiere Pro which I had some skills in, for example I knew how to cut the shots and import shots in, I also knew vaguely how to use some edits, me and Greg decided on the edits together however he tweaked them a bit. The internet played a huge part in most parts of our project as we used it to get some fonts for the digi-pack which we would have liked to have all the way through the digi-pack however we were unable to do this as the website could only convert a small amount of letters at the same time and doing all of the song lyrics would have took too much time which we needed for the editing. For our evaluation we used PowerPoint which we were already familiar with.