How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
An explicit part of this project has been the exploration of
all kinds of new media technologies. As the one taking
on the role of a camera operator, I had the time to
familiarise myself with the filming equipment. This included: a
PD 170 camcorder used for all interviews and cut-away shots;
tripod that we carried everywhere together with the camera as
it enabled us to produce still and well balanced shots;
headphones for interviews; VX cable; batteries; DV Tape; and tie-
clip microphone which is small and unobtrusive, reproducing the
human voice with great fidelity at the expense of the ambient sound
environment. Despite the camera not being completely alien to me,
as I have had some experience from past projects, I was still
lacking the knowledge required to understand things like the 'Menu'
on the camera. Therefore at first I stuck with just pressing 'Rec' and
relied on the information displayed on the LCD screen in terms of
time code, battery life and audio levels but later on my skills
expanded to a bit more than that, as for example I learned to use
manual focus by zooming in on the subject, pressing the Push Auto
button and then zooming out to frame the shot. This was very
useful for some of the cut-away shots containing moving objects but mainly for
interviews as the speaker is not positioned at the centre of the frame.
As part of the planning and research stage I
consulted to various mediums, some new and others
more traditional but all immensely helpful. To begin with, Mac Pro Computer was a
technology I had not worked with before but which didn’t turn out to be as
complicated as I expected. Through it I could access software such as Microsoft
Word which I consistently used for tasks involving long analytical multi-medium work
and creating tables to present information, but most importantly I could explore
Photoshop, which took a little time to figure out, but after I
grasped its basics I enjoyed the process of constructing my
Advertisement Poster. Via the variety of tools and effects it
was interesting to explore how the visual can be
‘manipulated’ and adapted to suit a certain idea.
Meanwhile, for the second part of the ancilliary texts, a
radio trailer, I became familiar with Final Cut Pro and
Soundtrack Pro. Final Cut Pro was essential for
constructing the radio trailer by bringing the different
element together e.g. narration, interviewee quotations
from the documentary and also music. Similarly to
Photoshop, it also ‘manipulates’ the real product and turns
it into something that suits us. Following, the editing of the
radio trailer I resorted to SoundCloud to convert the file in
order to upload it on the blog.
The process of creating a documentary required us
to record everything step by step, and the place we
did that was BlogSpot found in
[Link]. Both our Group and Personal
blogs enabled me to organise my work and
follow the progress we have made as a
group. It is also a place that is entirely
representative of our documentary topic
via the background, the posts and various
files of various formats uploaded through
HTML such as pictures, Scribd documents
and YouTube videos. Also, when we
decided to put our idea into a brainstorm form we came across [Link] which is a
website that seemed perfectly appropriate for that, however after using it for a while
we preferred to stick with Microsoft Word for this task. Nonetheless this brought
awareness as to what other alternatives are available.
More well-known mediums that I used as a resource include the Internet with its
search engines like Google and alternatively Joongel which helped me find websites
such as [Link] and many others from which I
could gain information in general about the topic,
theoretical perspectives on the topic and on the genre
itself, and also finding answers to any queries I may
have had along the way. Meanwhile, other resources
were Newspapers, from which I collected articles of
relevance to our topic, and Television, in particular the
Discovery Channel, where I could spy for any
conventions of the documentary film that could work for our documentary. But the
most traditional technology that we used was simply mobile phones
and emails as this were our ways of communication not
only with each other but also with those participating in
our documentary.
Moreover,
during the
evaluation
stage whilst searching for
an application that could present my
work, I came across Prezi which is a
presentation application that left me with
full control in terms of design. I could
position images and texts wherever I
wanted but also I could insert videos and
any other UTL based documents.
This project has taught me a great deal about new media technology. Most
importantly now I know what I’d enjoy using and what I am likely to struggle with
when it comes to media technology. From comparing the work I have produced
using different technology tools I think that I am more successfully productive when
resorting to computer based technologies rather than any others such as filming
equipment. This is something I’ll be considering for future projects.