How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
For me personally, I found that my use of Photoshop helped me to learn how to compose a poster. I had practised previously to learn how to construct on a layer by layer, on piece by piece to come up with a masterpiece of some form. When researching posters I took the basic idea of have main characters on the main image with additional information to draw in audiences. I also looked into Movie magazines as a fan of EMPIRE and TOTAL FILM, I could incorporate my knowledge with the sources to give more information into the background layout and construction.
With my practise, I had come up with this example of a thriller poster which from feedback was successful and realistic.
Where Photoshop came in useful, as did Photofiltre to re-size and edit the basics of the poster, be it colouring, or basic editing and exposure. An issue came with the layout and positioning for the practise, but the final didn’t have the same problems as we had a solid image. I had pieced photographs together which caused a problem with working how layout.
The main poster was simple to construct, as my experience of photo editing came in very useful when experimenting and learning new methods and styles.
For the trailer, we had experience of using it from GCSE which gave us a good idea of how to use the program and learn what effects we could create. An issue that came to mind with how to begin, what to do and what footage to put in what order. However, we experimented and put each our inputs to work out ordering and came to an agreement. I feel confident that the poster, magazine and trailer gave the audience a good sense of the genre and movie.
As previously mentioned, I had practiced making posters, as Ashvina had with editing on Adobe Premiere. Amy also had a good grasp of what footage we needed which aided each other to make the final three products. We could bring our skills to the project and help each experiment and learn as we went through the slow process to bring three pieces finished and all in correlation to the project, and each other. The only problem we had as a group was constructing a narrative, and from there getting a foundation for each medium. However, when we got past the initial issues, we had a strong foundation to spiral from and explore successfully.
The problems at AS level with constructing a magazine cover from scratch lessened the problems in A2. Having been at the stage without an idea where to begin, I could take the basic image and apply simple additions as a foundation. I feel that it was important to go for a simplicity look as for AS, originally I had gone for an idea that was too strict and hard to compose. The problems of layout were simple to repair with moving layers, shots and pieces around.
However, one problem we had was the restriction of copy-right images. I had planned a feature and image on Sylvester Stallone and ‘The Expendables’ but we couldn’t feature the image, and had to replace the image with words to work around that small obstacle. I was comfortable with the problems from the project with the technicalities, and could work through them.
The use of my blog had my work on the internet, and getting opinions on it. For example, firstly I was told that the gun was too dark and it wasn’t clear what the actual image was. I took the feedback actively when editing the pieces of medium together.
