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

Overall I used many different new technologies in the process of completing my coursework, here are some examples of the media that I used:

• Survey Monkey
• Blogger
• YouTube
• Final Cut Pro
• Garage Band
• Facebook
• Flikr
• Slideshare
• Video Camera plus equipment
• Photoshop

Survey monkey is a website that enables users to create an online survey. In order to conduct audience research, we created a questionnaire on the website and marketed our survey on the website Facebook. Overall around 30 different people responded to the questionnaire which I think is a lot more than if a face to face method was used. From this questionnaire we collected both qualitative and quantitative data and we were able to copy this to Microsoft Excel and create charts for our data. A disadvantage of using this site was that it did not give the results individually, so we were unable to see how for example a females responses differed to a males. Also, putting the data into Excel was difficult and time consuming but the website offered no alternatives.

I found Blogger to be a very annoying way to present my work. At first the idea of blogging all of my work seemed good, having it all in one place that I could access from anywhere and being able to present the work in an aesthetic way. However, I found that using Blogger was rather limiting, customisation was very difficult and I had many issues with writing posts because when they appeared on my blog the text would be the same colour as the background (shown below) and disappear. It was very time consuming having to repeatedly change settings and such, plus I found that the idea of presenting work together didn't really work as most posts disappeared from the page after more had been posted. I think that I would have preferred to either be able to customise the blog completely and lay out my work how I wanted to, or just create a simple portfolio of work that can be read simply and simultaneously without error.

 is a video sharing website in which people can upload videos or just simply watch them. After completing my trailer it was then uploaded to YouTube so that I could then link it to my blog and also access it from any location. YouTube also helped in my planning and research because I was able to watch other trailers to look for conventions and to gain inspiration. Although a convenient method of linking videos to my blog I found that when trying to take stills from it many adverts appeared or whilst full screen it did not buffer properly.


Final Cut Pro was the programme that we used to edit our trailer. From this we could produce special effects, edit shots, create transitions and generally create an interesting product that is conventional of a horror trailer. However, I found this programme to be quite difficult to use and so our trailer could have suffered due to our lack of experience using the software. Also, it is only available on Apple Mac computers, so any editing had to be done in college in our media classroom, proving difficult for weekends or holidays. To see which tools I used particularly, see the other post under this label. (click here).

Garage band is also a programme that we used on a Mac to produce sound for our trailer. We could then import this sound to the trailer and make sure that it is fitting to the visuals. However, it seemed that when looking for music and templates we could use, it was very time consuming trying to look through all of the options and we spent a lot of wasted time listening to random sound effects. Most of the sound that we actually used in the trailer we downloaded from a free music sharing site, including the sound effects we used which could not be found on the programme.

I found to be a very useful tool in the aid of analysing texts, it allowed me to upload an image and annotate it specifically; giving it labels and annotations to each label. This is something that I definitely preferred to written work as the text became interactive and most likely much more interesting for an audience to read. It was also very easy to attach this to my blog, however the labels only became visible whilst on the Flikr website; this lead to me having to write (click for labels) under each image. This I found to be awkward, and I think it may have been better if Flikr allowed for the labels to show up on Blogger.

The entire point of using a blog as a medium is to show coursework in a more creative way, therefore I found that Slideshare was a great website to use. For things such as my audience research, I was able to create a PowerPoint Presentation, something that displays information such as this in a visual way. I could then upload it to the website Slideshare, and attach this to my blog. You are then able to scroll through the presentation on your blog, and it becomes a more interesting way to present data. However, in one presentation I uploaded, I found that Slideshare uploaded the slideshow and changed the colour scheme. Meaning that you could no longer see the text and so I had to change the colour of it. I'm not sure why it did this, but it was something I found strange whilst using the site.

In order to physically film our trailer and create my ancillary tasks it was important to use camera equipment, we needed a tri-pod, a camera and lighting to create a product that looked professional. The cameras that we used were capable of filming in full HD quality, and so my trailer is available to watch in full 1080p if you have the broadband capacity to buffer it. There was not much that I could fault with the equipment it's self, most of it worked efficiently and dealt with the task well.

To create my ancillary tasks, I needed to use Photoshop. Photoshop is software with many uses, what I used it for was to create a film magazine and also a film poster for my trailer. Since last year I have learnt well how to use Photoshop, and the fact that in AS level I spent many months creating a magazine cover and just a week and a half in A2; shows that I have made progress developing my skills in this software. Photoshop is a good tool of creating texts if you know how to use it, but similarly to Final Cut Pro if you don't know how to use it your work can really suffer.

Overall I have used a lot of technology in order to complete my coursework, some of it I enjoyed using and found to be an effective way of producing work. Some I found to be rather difficult and that lacked customisation.