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

Planning and preparation

New media technologies helped in this process in aiding things such as time, practicality and inspiration. In this stage we had gathered most of our research and was planning our film and constructing scripts, video shooting schedules and storyboards. We did most of this on Microsoft Word, creating these documents. We also found Microsoft e-mail outlook helpful too in order to quickly organise happenings within the group, like emailing each other things such as preparing props for next day, making travel arrangements and ensuring cameras and work at home was brought in. We also used e-mail to ask people to star in our film trailer.  Another new media technique we used for the planning stage of our project was to use Corel Video Studio12 to make practice film edits to see what would be the correct camera angle to use, and to see such things as time and colour manipulation techniques. We also used things such as Microsoft Excel to create graphs and tables clearly showing the answers from our questionnaire, helping us plan around these clearly shown answers. New camera equipment such as Sony Flip cameras came in handy with easy to use one press shoot filming, and easy to find camera captures clearly marked out on the camera. One of our group members also brought in his own personal video camera, which was a Samsung top of the range. This came in handy as it had different modes on the camera itself, instead of doing it on the editing software; this was such things as colour modes.

Research

We decided to conduct a long series of research to find aspects to our trailer such as genre, music and appropriate camera angles. We did this by looking at film trailers on the internet on such sites as YouTube and Empire, where we could extensively look into films such as The Crazies and The Blair Witch Project to incorporate things we saw into our own media project. New media technologies such as these websites has allowed us to gain inspiration from real media conventions and put them into our own practice, which is a big boost in the creation of our media project. We used other sites such as Google to find other aspects of research such as target audiences and if films like ours had been done before and how to steer away from the normal conventions. Music sites such as iTunes came in handy for the music selection to our trailer, storing a large amount of music to pick from and try out by overlaying them in our practice trailers. Another big factor for our project was the audience research and what our target demographic wanted out of the film. We conducted a number of surveys from things such as what is you favourite music in a horror trailer And what’s your age. We did this through Microsoft Excel creating a questionnaire and used social networks such as facebook to give out this questionnaire, this way receiving a larger response rate for a better generalisation. Our whole research part was predominantly on the computer, using new media technologies.   

Evaluation
We did this first by putting it on YouTube and taking necessary feedback and criticism which anybody can put forward. We also used sites such a facebook to post our trailer on also wanting comments to evaluate and receive constructive criticism towards our project. These new media technologies have opened doors for media planning, construction and evaluation.