How did you use media technologies in the construction and

research, planning and evaluation stages?

By Jack Beale-Burchell

O When looking at the programmes used during the pre-production process, there was one programme in particular that I personally used to put together professional looking storyboards, this programme is called “Comic Life” which has a feature which allows you to create a storyboard. The programme itself was very easy to use, and after all the footage was created I personally used to it to create a production storyboard with stills from the documentary, to act as a guideline for editing the documentary, and to be a clearer indication of the structure of the documentary. The technology effectively allowed us to speed up the editing process because of how I used stills to create a new, more accurate storyboard.

O Here is the revised story board, which contains still images from the footage. We used this as a guide during editing.

O The use of the blogs really helped share a lot of the research we accumulated as a team, as it allowed us to access it at any given point, whether at home or whilst editing. With this sharing of pre-production research it kept all members of the team „in the loop‟ which meant we had much more time for shooting the documentary and everyone was extremely prepared and knew what to do during production, as we had shared a shot list on there. This made the production and post-production stages easier, as everyone had access to story boards whilst editing.

O There were a series of programmes used during production, which some were easy to use, other required time to be taken to learn how to use the programme. One such programme was the editing software „Final Cut Pro‟ which allowed us to edit our documentary to a coherent and professional aesthetic. Final Cut itself, after learning how to properly use it, is fairly straightforward to use as its timeline feature allowed for easy composition of the documentary, and some of its effects features, for example the ability to modify the speed of clips, really helped add a professional touch to the documentary. These features helped make the documentary very professional and added some „tricks‟, used my documentary makers to further reinforce the codes and conventions of modern documentaries.

O Here is a selection of screen shots of our use

final cut pro.

O The programme that we used to create the radio trail was „garage band‟ which I personally had some experience in using. Because of this previous use of garage band, I was able to create and produce the radio trail to high level of quality, using many producer techniques, such as panning and automation, to create a stereo track with an interesting use of dynamic shaping. These features are what led to the radio trail being of such a high quality. I used a shotgun microphone to record the vocal, then using final cut to trim it into sections and export them as separate sound files, only to be imported into garage band where they could be mastered and edited to make them sound clearer. The production of the radio trailer and the software used to create it was fairly simple once you have learned how to use it, and this allowed for the professional and successful creation of a high quality radio trailer.

O Here is a selection of screen shots from the production of the radio trail.

O To produce the double paged article we first drafted up the main body of text for the article on Microsoft Word, which is a basic word processor which is very straightforward and simple to use. The photos were then taken and edited in photoshop to touch them up and make the look more professional. To piece together the article we used Adobe‟s “InDesign” programme, the programme itself has settings where you can produce a double paged article, right down to how the columns are arranged. With guidance from drawn plans for a double paged article, and research into double paged article spreads from magazines such as radio times, we replicated a double paged feature article in „Radio Times‟ house style, which led to the article as a whole looking very professional.

O The evaluation section was completed

using Microsoft PowerPoint and then

uploaded to the blog using a piece of

internet software called „slideshare‟.