#indesigncs6

[g324hollysims-blog]

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

BLOG

I believe I used my blog on Tumblr effectively to document the planning, research and progress of my A2 Media Coursework over the course of the year. 

Hyperlinks

My use of hyperlinks within posts has made it simple to investigate the source of a text, and gives the text more credibility. Some hyperlinks I have used include the link to my coursework partner's Blogspot consistently; links through to magazine websites if mentioned, as well as the IMDB's of films I wrote about. See below: 

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I think the design of the blog is attractive and simple to read - I chose a black and white masthead background photograph of Liverpool Street station during the 1930's to tie in with the ongoing theme and so the red, white and blue imagery in the posts would stand out even more. An 'Archive' link lets you jump to months quickly to avoid scrolling backwards in time (see second image).

Image

I believe my use of graphics and imagery has been consistent on the blog. It supports the text and makes the blog more interesting and attractive to read. Whether it be to help demonstrate an opinion or to document influences and ideas, the use of image has been significant to the blog. 

A look at some images used to demonstrate our interest in the Realism genre. 

My blog icon - it is consistent with the London theme of the production. 

It also was useful in demonstrating myself and Georgia's work progress, to give an insight into production and design.

Tagging

The ability to tag posts with relevant keywords made it easy to search for different post topics and label them with simple information. Tagging is something that in present day social media is the norm, and makes the search process within websites more efficient. 

Tumblr's dashboard is helpful in that it gives you the opportunity to easily post anything from links, to video to images. The only limitation I found with Tumblr was that I couldn't include videos within text posts like I was able to include images. 

CAMERA 

Construction: Filming

We used a Sony Handycam to capture our short film. This meant it was small, light and efficient and meant that because we were travelling around London and had a lot of moving around it was easy to work with, but after beginning to edit the footage we realised just how much we had compromised on video and audio quality. We encountered a lot of background noise from traffic that the lower quality microphone in this camera had trouble with. Although the video quality isn't terrible, it is quite average. In my next production I would want to upgrade on the camera quality.

The Tripod we used helped us keep a steadier picture in longer or more awkward shots such as 'Nan writing out the birthday card'.

We didn't use the tripod excessively as a feature of the realism genre is a 'handheld camera' feel to the filming. This is seen in 'Love, Honour and Obey', a film we were very much influenced by, and seen clearly in this particular scene.

SOFTWARE

Adobe Photoshop CS6 

We used Adobe Photoshop to design and create the promotional poster for 'A Day in the Life'. Photoshop was great because we knew we could create almost anything we wanted. Due to the fact that we wanted a minimal design, we did not use a lot of 'effects', and instead concentrated on alignment, layout and fonts. We used around 30 layers in the design and used standard tools like 'crop' and 'eyedropper' to erase the real station names.

Adobe InDesign CS6

We used Adobe InDesign to create our magazine article, which was great as the program is simple to use and gives you at lot of freedom to be creative with your design. The 'place' tool was used to arrange our header and columns, and the text tool for our text boxes. The preview option was helpful in giving us an idea of the finished product. The review was first written out on Microsoft Word and copied onto the article at a later date for clarity. Difficulties with the design included text placement and sizing, but we achieved the design we wanted in the end. 

Final Cut Pro 7

To edit our film 'A Day in the Life' we used Final Cut Pro 7 on an iMac. Tools we used included 'pen' to manipulate the sound levels, 'razor' to cut our clips to their desired length and 'text' to create our titles and credits. With effects we used video filters called 'fish-eye', 'radial blur' and 'refraction' for the drug montage. I enjoyed using Final Cut Pro as is allowed us to edit our short film in considerable detail, and we could use really effective filters and colour manipulations that wouldn't have been possible without this specific program. The only limitation I found to have with FCP7 was the need to render every minute or so, but this couldn't be helped. 

[g324hollysims-blog]

EVALUATION: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

MAGAZINE ARTICLE:

Our magazine article was created on InDesign CS6 and gives information about our short film 'A Day in The Life' as well as a review and overall verdict with a star rating.

We continued our colour theme of red, white and blue for continuity purposes and featured an image of the Trafalgar Square station sign to help marry it together.

We researched not only the design and graphic side of film review magazine but the literature and writing style used in them too. Sight and Sound and Empire were our main sources of inspiration and the review pages influenced our layout and writing style considerably. 

We named our magazine 'IN SHORT' to give the impression it is a specialised short film magazine, but the play on words with 'in short' suggests to the reader that they will be able to get the knowledge in concise and easy bites.  

Features used in our magazine article include a pull quote - we decided that the quote itself should be a rhetorical question from the review as it intrigues the reader even more; the word "tenner" is slang and therefore keeps the reading experience casual and fun.

The verdict is something that, like a pull quote, showed up time and time again in the film reviews. If a reader is short on time and wants a concise overview and recommendation of the film, they can glance at the verdict and star rating. Our film has been given four stars as it is "simple yet effective".

The logo for our magazine 'IN SHORT' was influenced by Empire's 'In Film' logo. It's in the red white and blue colour theme and is simple with an arrow, and placed in the top left corner of the page. 

A black double border keeps the design looking clean and easy to read, as does the standard column layout. Little details such as the month issue and page number means that our magazine article has used many forms and conventions of a real media product. 

The film review itself discusses everything from the narrative, to the characters to the setting so the reader gets a well rounded idea of what to expect from 'A Day in the Life'. 

[g324hollysims-blog]

Georgia is currently working on the magazine article/review for our short film. We're following through with a red, white and blue colour theme, and a simple page layout with an image of the subway in Trafalgar Square at the top half of the page and four columns with text underneath. We've taken inspiration from entertainment magazines like Empire and TotalFilm. We've used InDesign CS6 to produce the magazine article.