The most obvious new technology used in this coursework project is this blog, I guess. It's also been the biggest influence on how I've worked. At the beginning of the project I was pretty against working electronically, thinking it was much nicer to be able to work on paper and use real materials... Whilst that's still true, I've really really warmed to this format - So much so that once I'm done with this, I reckon I might actually miss blogging. Sad, right? Maybe.
Also, I like being able to fiddle with and design the blog. Over the course of the months it's been running, I've changed the design quite a few times...
The best thing about working on blogs is also the community feeling you get - alright, so, my blog is hardly bulging at the seems with comments and feedback, but it's definitely been a good node for communication with a couple of people. Similarly, it's good to be able to look around at other students work from other schools and colleges. The same goes for YouTube. Despite my many objections to the copyright rules on there, the site is good for generally browsing through other A2 students work. I was surprised to actually be found and get a comment from another group of students on there, but more on that in the feedback question...
What else can I say about the blog? It does feel a lot more casual than paper work, and that's something else I really like. I also like that that enables me to use a lot more casual language, because it feels like I'm talking to real people rather than just writing drivel on a piece of paper that only a few people will look at... And of course - less paper is more green, which is always a plus.
Other new technologies I used were obviously stuff to capture my ideas, like the video camera (thanks Ron :P) and my own normal camera, plus my scanner when I was photocopying and scanning Dan for the poster and magazine cover... These were all perfectly adequate, but of course it would have been nice to have stuff that was better quality. I think the hardest thing to capture well would have been sound, if I had wanted to do a voice over (and having no decent mic was a big influence in my decision on that, if I'm honest). Similarly, not having a studio or anywhere to take photos on a plain background was irritating and took some initiative. It also resulted in lots of discarded footage and pictures like this...
Annnd, of course, I should talk about the software I used. As I said in earlier posts, I used Premiere Pro to edit my moving footage, and for my print based editing I used a lot of Microsoft Word and Photoshop. I also used Paint (gasp), because it's much faster for saving .jpgs than PhotoShop, I find. Sometimes simplicity is just nice.
Premiere Pro I found surprisingly easy to use, apart from a few crashes and few issues in the beginning with input formats.
With Premiere Pro I didn't go too deep into any flashy editing, and I didn't use any extra programs like AfterEffects or iMovie simply because I didn't have access to them. If I had been able to, I don't know if my final trailer would have been much different... Premiere Pro was perfectly adequate for what I wanted, which was being able to make short sharp cuts in the footage and be able to move it around easily. I found the different timelines really useful for moving things around, similary the automatic save function (!).
One thing that did get me with Premiere Pro was the function were the editor is able to make their own titles... I really didn't like that, and thought that mostly things came out looking fake or over-produced. To deal with this I made my own .jpg images to put into the timeline to act as the narration and film titles. This allowed, for me, a greater scope design-wise and also helped me be able to keep consistent with the same typeface that I would go on to use in the poster.
PhotoShop and Word I used a lot for image manipulation. I find whilst PhotoShop is obviously more professional and provides a much more polished end project, Word is much better for dong easy and quick cropping, and simple copy and pasting. For example, this idea was all produced in Word...
... while on the other hand, I made things such as whats below in PhotoShop. I also made the majority of my title .jps in Word and then printscreened them into Paint and then resaved them as image files, so they would be easier to move around and play with.
