Brandon used a variety of media technologies throughout the construction, research, and planning stages of his project. He used his personal computer and the school computers to conduct online research using search engines like Google and websites like YouTube. He edited videos using Sony Vegas and created graphics using Photoshop. Brandon also presented his work using websites like Prezi, Emaze, and SlideShare. A key technology was the Edublogs website where he uploaded all of his work. He also used Survey Monkey to conduct target audience research and a camera to film shots for his trailer.

1. BrandonHanlon
Evaluation Question 4: How did you usemedia technologies in the
construction, research and planning stages?
For research and planning, I used media technologies in a variety of ways, for example when
I needed to research something, I would use the PCs or MACs at school or I would use my
own PC, this technology was also useful for every other stage. For example, I used my own
PC with help from Charlie when editing the trailer, poster and magazine and used software
like Sony Vegas and Photoshop, without a PC doing these tasks would have been impossible.
Sony Vegas was the main editing tool when we edited the trailer, we added a lot of things
using this as well as piecing all of our shots together in the first place, a few examples of
what we did included adding a white balance, filters, transitions, importing files, editing the
music and adding sound as well as fade ins and fade outs. I think this program was very
useful as it is a fast piece of software with a lot of different options to enhance videos.

2. BrandonHanlon
Photoshop was the main editing tool when we edited the magazine front cover and poster,
this is a very useful piece of software and I have used it before in college in ICT, so I had
experience with it, some of the things we have done with the software was resizing images
and text after receiving feedback, this was useful as we could change how the media
products looked and improved the structure of them. Another thing we did with photoshop
was creating the title of the film, we used the top secret regular font, changed the colour of
it to a blood red and then added a white outline as well as removing the letter “o” and
adding fingerprints instead as this linked to the crime genre.
When researching, I would use the search engine Google and then navigate through to find
what I wanted. Youtube was another important part of research, it is a popular and well
known website that allowed me to watch real media trailers so that I could then note down
the conventions which we later used in our own trailer, YouTube was also used when we
uploaded the animatic and different versions of our trailer, poster and magazine front
cover, it is a reliable website to upload videos on therefore we used it.
Also, as I needed to present my planning and research in different ways, it was important to
find websites that allowed me to present work, which was unique and different to others,
therefore I mostly used prezi, emaze and slideshare as these were all reliable websites I
have used before and are each different, while slideshare lets me upload documents emaze
and prezi allows you to create your own unique looking presentation using their website.

3. BrandonHanlon
Another important media technology was the edublogs website, without it I would not be
able to complete my work, as my media work is based around my blog and coursework, it is
a very useful website which allows the user to organise their work and embed things such as
videos, pictures and presentations from other sites such as prezi or emaze. Every time I
made a change to something or did something new I immediately uploaded it to edublogs, it
is fast and easy to use.
Another part of media technology used was survey monkey, this website allowed us to
create an online questionnaire which was used for our target audience research, it was an
effective method for target audience research as it reached people online who may not
have even been living in the United Kingdom, giving us a varied amount of responses and
opinions, it gave us feedback for our work, therefore it was effective.
A camera was also another piece of media technology that was extremely important,
without the camera we would not have been able to record the shots needed for our trailer,
with it we could filmthe shots and change the camera angles, for example long angle shots
and close up shots were used when we filmed. Also we had to use an SD card in the camera
to store the shots filmed which we later used with a PC to import the rushes onto the PC,
the SD card is a very important piece of technology which kept the files safe until they were
imported, allowing us to begin editing.