Christoph's Media Blog: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Final Cut Pro X:

My most important tool in the construction stage, and sometimes within the planning stage, was Final Cut Pro X - as I feel that my main strength is as an editor, I used this editing software to produce some of my planning as well as the final task.
I had some experience of Final Cut Pro X before the beginning of my A2 year, as I had used the same software to previously produce my AS task. This meant that I was happy to use Final Cut as a form of technology to produce some of my planning at any stage, as it is an impressive piece of software but one that I could use fairly easily.
I used Final Cut as a way of editing together some location recce footage and also in analysing my choice of actor and influential actors.
In producing the final task, however, I came to develop my skills in Final Cut as creating the piece required me to broaden my knowledge of the software.
The creation of my ident was done through Final Cut, and here I used many of the features of the software in order to create something that looked professional: I sped up the shot of the buildings by x8, applied colour correction to make it look more stylised, and employed the Ken Burns tool in giving the effect of it shrinking back while the studio title is revealed.
I frequently modified the colour balance, saturation and exposure of my images in order to make them look sharper and more stylish. I also used tools such as the blade tool in order to produce frequent cuts to and from black towards the end of the trailer, and the stabilisation tool in order to give a smooth look to the camera motion during the aerial shot of the industrial location.
I also used Final Cut to edit the audio - on the radio announcement, I applied the 'telephone' effect to give the sound of a radio voice.

Blogger:

Blogger has been a useful tool for me, as it has allowed me to post my research, planning, construction and evaluation updates frequently and artistically.
Through Blogger, I have been able to embed Prezis and PowerPoints, upload pictures, transfer text and attach videos from YouTube: as well as being a reliable, easy-to-access service which allows me to frequently post updates, it has also given me the freedom to be able to present evaluation in artistic and original forms.

Photoshop:

I knew little to nothing about Photoshop before beginning to use it in creating my poster and some of my evaluation tasks, though I am now developing my skills with it and have found it particularly useful with regard to presenting my evaluation.
Despite initially struggling with Photoshop, I now find it to be a straightforward way of presenting images in a professional manner - frequently in my evaluation, I have had to create collages of multiple images, and Photoshop has always been useful for this - I created a professional looking image which was a combination of 9 frames from my trailer for one of my evaluation questions, and I am happy with the result of it.
When making the poster, I had to test the skills I had developed as I superimposed an image of Callum into a separate background picture of my Greenwich location - I used the magnetic lasso tool to crop Callum out from a photo and the result of this was surprisingly impressive. Using Photoshop was definitely the right choice for creating my poster as I know of no other photo editing software that would allow for me to cut out and superimpose images as easily and also effectively.