THE NARRATOR BY JAMES FLANAGAN

Evaluation question: In what ways does you media product

use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products?

During the construction of my short film, I have used a wide

range of media technologies to enable me to create

different products, present my work in different ways and

to develop my understanding of the media industry.

USING CELTX

Celtx is a free program that offers the user an ability to write scripts,

screenplays and produce detailed maps for filmography and

lighting setups. The final products look much more professional than

using word or publisher to create documents such as these and the

process was made even easier by using command lines to produceeffective screenplays and camera storyboards.

EVALUATION

Celtx was a great platform to create a screenplay. It was easy to

pick up and learn how to use the user interface and was efficient to

use. Most notably, its ability to speed up the pre production element

of filming whilst retaining a sense of quality within produced

documents was very good. Using Celtx allowed me to create ascreenplay for my protagonist and narrator character to read and

follow effectively.

YOUTUBE

YouTube was a great place to showcase my rough cuts, final

product, behind the scenes videos as well as using it as a resource

for audience feedback. Once I uploaded my videos after

converting them from my Sony Vegas Pro editing files it was easy to

upload them to YouTube’s file servers with no limit in the size of thevideo upload. I had to use QuickTime conversion to export it as a

QuickTime movie and then changed the setting so that YouTube

could upload all my videos in full 1080p.

EVALUATION

I found YouTube very helpful for showcasing my

rough cuts and final production. The feedback I

received from the anonymous YouTube community

was overwhelming as well as being the most useful

feature of YouTube. YouTube also became a great resource for looking into existing student short film

projects, something that couldn’t be found on the

very useful www.shortofhteweek.com

PREZI

Prezi was a very useful website. It allowed you to create fancy spider

diagrams that seem to flow better than anything PowerPoint can

offer. I felt as if the website offered a lot of personalisation, and

once you got into the heavy details of using the interface it

became a very effective resource for showcasing my idea process.

EVALUATION

Prezi has given my work variation as well as an interesting space to

present my idea surrounding research tasks and the thought process

of my final film. I have used it in answering my evaluation questions

as well because of its effectiveness at showcasing so many different

elements of online resources in one package.

SLIDESHARE AND SCRIBD

These are two of the simplest and most effective resources I have used

over the course. Slideshare allows uploaded powerpoints to be

embedded into blogger whereas Scirbd does the same action but for

word and PDF documents. Both sites use embed codes to be

implanted directly into a blogger post.

EVALUATION

Both of these sites were extremely useful in presenting my word

documents and pdf files. The most useful online resource being

slideshare because it has allowed me to upload all my powerpoint

works. The presentation of my blog overall has improved by using

Slideshare and I recommend anyone doing media blog work at anAS or A2 level to be using this resource.

PHOTOSHOP AND INDESIGN

Photoshop and InDesign by Adobe are fantastic pieces of editing

software. They gave me the opportunity of editing my photo layers,

masks, filters, blurring, brightness, contrast filters and other great

tools. I used Photoshop in making my two ancillary products as well

as creating the custom font I used in my final poster. InDesign wasalso a very effective resource in the creation of my second ancillary

product – my little white lies magazine insert review.

EXAMPLE OF HOW PHOTOSHOP

HAS IMPROVED MY WORK

CONTINUED

USING FINAL CUT PRO 7 ANS SONY

VEGAS PRO 9

Final cut pro 7 is a very good video editing platform and is easy to

work with after the basics have been learned. The program has

allowed me to edit from a timeline as well as edit diegetic and non

diegetic sound clips. I have used widescreen filters as well as

creating a cinematic blue tint filter through Sony Vegas to producea video that overall has a much better quality to it.

EVALUATION

Both video editing platforms have offered a straight forward and

professional way of editing my short film. Once the basic controls

were understood, the different techniques and skills required could

be perfected. Overall I think Sony Vegas pro 9 offered the most

intriguing layout and was a much better program to work with.

USING LOGIC PRO AND GARAGE BAND

Logic Pro and Garage band were great

programs for creating and exporting a final

soundtrack for my blog and final film. Logic

was a program that I had not previously used,

but it was very effective in creating musical

scores once I had leant the basics to the

programs user interface. Contrastingly, garage

band was a program I had previously had

many years of experience with. I decided to

use the iPad version for the first time which was

an amazing leap from the version available on

mac. This gave me portability of carrying the

soundtrack on the go and editing it whenever

I saw fit.

EVALUATION

I felt like Logic Pro really helped to develop the smoothness of audio

within my soundtrack, and fix many of the audio problems I

experienced with my final film. Because of my initial problems with

Narration, it was easy to do noise reduction and apply other filters to

improve the audio quality. Garage band was great for portabilityand I would recommend anyone who is on the course who has an

iPad to edit using this app.

IMDB AND SHORT OF THE WEEK

IMDB (or the internet movie database) has been extremely

useful during the research stages of my blog. I have an

account which allows me to view additional statistic to

those found on the main films pages which was great to aid

my initial short film research. I was also able to research into

short films by refining searches based on specified target

audiences. This gave me the opportunity to research into

target audience also which was a great thing to have to

hand. Short Of The Week was an online website where short

films from all around the world were reviewed and critiqued.

This was a fantastic resource in finding short films that linked

to the drama genre. It also gave me the opportunity to

establish how professionally based and independent based

short films were made

EVALUATION

These were fantastic sites for the initial research stages of the blog

and again I would recommend anyone taking the course who is

looking into producing a short film to use these websites.

Additionally I discovered two websites – www.Bubble.us which

allows its users to make intricate spider diagrams as well as creating text mood boards.

FLICKR

Flicker was a great site to receive audience feedback and to

evaluate on my own work with linked comments. This site allowed

me to preview my work as well as send it out to an anonymous

audience who would most definitely criticise each image I

uploaded. Whilst this was a good starting point I think the site couldbe better if you could refine the audiences that were able to view

your work so it benefited my research into target audiences more.