my response the fourth question asked in the A2 media coursework evaluation.

1. How did you use media
technologies in the
construction and
research, planning and
evaluation stages?
By Jack Beale-Burchell

2. O When looking at the programmes used
during the pre-production process, there was
one programme in particular that I personally
used to put together professional looking
storyboards, this programme is called
“Comic Life” which has a feature which
allows you to create a storyboard. The
programme itself was very easy to use, and
after all the footage was created I personally
used to it to create a production storyboard
with stills from the documentary, to act as a
guideline for editing the documentary, and to
be a clearer indication of the structure of the
documentary. The technology effectively
allowed us to speed up the editing process
because of how I used stills to create a new,
more accurate storyboard.

3. O Here is the revised story board, which contains still images
from the footage. We used this as a guide during editing.

4. O The use of the blogs really helped share a lot of
the research we accumulated as a team, as it
allowed us to access it at any given point,
whether at home or whilst editing. With this
sharing of pre-production research it kept all
members of the team „in the loop‟ which meant
we had much more time for shooting the
documentary and everyone was extremely
prepared and knew what to do during production,
as we had shared a shot list on there. This made
the production and post-production stages
easier, as everyone had access to story boards
whilst editing.

5. O There were a series of programmes used
during production, which some were easy to
use, other required time to be taken to learn
how to use the programme. One such
programme was the editing software „Final Cut
Pro‟ which allowed us to edit our documentary
to a coherent and professional aesthetic. Final
Cut itself, after learning how to properly use it,
is fairly straightforward to use as its timeline
feature allowed for easy composition of the
documentary, and some of its effects features,
for example the ability to modify the speed of
clips, really helped add a professional touch to
the documentary. These features helped make
the documentary very professional and added
some „tricks‟, used my documentary makers to
further reinforce the codes and conventions of
modern documentaries.

6. O Here is a selection of screen shots of our use
final cut pro.

8. O The programme that we used to create the
radio trail was „garage band‟ which I
personally had some experience in using.
Because of this previous use of garage
band, I was able to create and produce the
radio trail to high level of quality, using many
producer techniques, such as panning and
automation, to create a stereo track with an
interesting use of dynamic shaping. These
features are what led to the radio trail being
of such a high quality. I used a shotgun
microphone to record the vocal, then using
final cut to trim it into sections and export
them as separate sound files, only to be
imported into garage band where they could
be mastered and edited to make them
sound clearer. The production of the radio
trailer and the software used to create it was
fairly simple once you have learned how to
use it, and this allowed for the professional
and successful creation of a high quality
radio trailer.

9. O Here is a selection of screen shots from the
production of the radio trail.

11. O To produce the double paged article we first
drafted up the main body of text for the article on
Microsoft Word, which is a basic word processor
which is very straightforward and simple to use.
The photos were then taken and edited in
photoshop to touch them up and make the look
more professional. To piece together the article
we used Adobe‟s “InDesign” programme, the
programme itself has settings where you can
produce a double paged article, right down to
how the columns are arranged. With guidance
from drawn plans for a double paged article, and
research into double paged article spreads from
magazines such as radio times, we replicated a
double paged feature article in „Radio Times‟
house style, which led to the article as a whole
looking very professional.

13. O The evaluation section was completed
using Microsoft PowerPoint and then
uploaded to the blog using a piece of
internet software called „slideshare‟.