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

We have learnt a lot about new media technologies through this task, although we have used many of these technologies in previous tasks, this one has allowed us to gain more knowledge about them and therefore use them to make our media products the best they could be. We used technologies such as Pinnacle, blogger, youtube, facebook, photoshop and edirol.

• Pinnacle was one of the most vital and important pieces of technology that we needed to learn about and use. Although we have previously used this programme, my group and I felt that we needed to use it to the best of our ability and make a teaser trailer to a high standard. We used this new technology to create our teaser trailer, we needed to master uploading new pieces of video from other devices such as a camera or edirol and be able to edit it to the best of our ability. As a group we helped each other the gain this knowledge, and each of us edited different bits of our media product so we could all build on our skills. We also needed to get to grip with inserting transitions into the correct place in our video, and making it run smoothly from clip to clip. We thought we used this technology very well, as we edited all the different footage we had filmed, in order to create the best possible teaser trailer.
• We also used blogger a lot in our coursework, as this was were we evaluated the process of creating or media products. If we made certain changes or improvements to our media products this is where we needed to describe and most importantly evaluate it, suggesting how it works well and why. It was important that we improved our knowledge on this technology, as we used this many times in the process of creating our media products. We also needed to gain knowledge of how to upload pictures and videos which would help use to evaluate all aspects of our media products.
• We also used photoshop, in which we haven't previously used in our coursework before so this was a useful skill which we gained. Even though i have never used this programme before, Mercedes and Rachel have previously used this technology therefore they took the lead on editing our pictures. I think by having this knowledge allowed us to create more professional pictures which fitted in well with our ancillary texts. We mostly used photoshop on our pictures for our magazine and poster. We needed to input our chosen picture and cut around it, so that we could play around with the background to get the right one to suit our genre. Once we had decided on a white background we could cut out the pictures and add in the background colour. We could also use this technology to take out any specific elements that didn't look right such as the red eye of the characters. By using this technology made our pictures look more professional and appealed to our target audience.
• To gain feedback from our target audience we needed to use Facebook and Youtube. We have previously used these websites, in which we have previous skills on how to use them. By using them in this task allowed us to improve our knowledge and add to the skills we have previously learnt, which included uploading videos, and linking them so people can easily watch them and give us feedback.
• The last main technology that we used in our coursework was the edirol. We used this specifically when we needed to record one of our teachers Mr Julian reading out specific lines which we had created ourselves. This would then become our voice over. This was an important element of creating our teaser trailer therefore we needed to use the edirol correctly so that it would allow our media product to look a professional as possible. By using the edirol it allowed us to record as much as we wanted so that when we uploaded it to Pinnacle we had a lot of recordings to choose from and edit.

Overall we have learnt a lot from using these new technologies and there is some new skills which we have learnt and made use create the best media products that we possible could.