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

2. Research and planning
A lot of the research done for our documentary was done online using
secondary research. Our topic was binge drinking and so we did research
online regarding facts and statistics, both from the past and up to date so
we could see the changes. We found this out by doing a Google search.

3. As we wanted our documentary to be up to date
we used various news sites to find out about binge
drinking and current facts and statistics. We used
websites on Internet Explorer such as The
Guardian, The Telegraph and BBC news

4. We also did research into what
channel we were going to air our
documentary on. We went on the
websites of Channel 4, BBC and
ITV, we looked at their remits,
other documentaries shown and
target audiences to see which one
would be best suited, we came to
the conclusion that Channel 4
would be our chosen channel.

5. We did research into similar
documentaries so that we
could note down common
conventions and then use them
in ours. To do this we used
online players such as ITV
player and 4od. For
documentaries that were no
longer available on the
websites, we used YouTube.

6. All of the research that we done we put up onto Prezi, Scribd or slideshare
and then we embedded this onto our blog on blogger.com. Our blog was
useful as we could put our ideas together and see what each of us was doing
and what more needed to still be done.
To embed links onto the blog we had
to use the html option

7. Filming
After all of our research and planning was done, we then started our filming
using what we had planned and our storyboard. To film our footage we used a
Canon camera sometimes we did handheld shots but most of the time we used
a tripod to get professional shots such as our vox pops and professional
interviews.

8. The camera was useful to us and we were able to use various features on
there to get the exact shots that we needed. We were able to use the
zoom tool to zoom in and out of shots, when on the tripod we were able
to turn it while it was still to get a good pan shot, we also learnt how to
change the focus giving us effects that went in and out of focus. When
doing our reconstruction in particular we had to change the colour so we
changed the white balance to make it darker.
Shot where white balance has
Out of focus shot been changed

9. Also when filming we had to use equipment to record the sound. We used
a directional microphone and headphones. These helped to control the
sound levels as no background noise was being picked up and we were
able to hear exactly what it would sound like at the time of recording. The
microphone was especially useful when filming our interviews and vox
pops.

10. Editing
When we had finished our filming we uploaded all of the footage onto the
Apple iMac. We then opened the programme final cut express which
would be used to edit the whole documentary on, and we then used ‘log
and transfer’ to upload all of our wanted clips on to there in order for
them to be ready to edit straight away.
We then had to ‘add selection to
queue’
Final cut
express
The clips then appeared here and were
ready to be edited

11. To get writing on the professional
interviews we used text to put over
them, this blue box then allowed us to
position the writing to where we would
like it, in this case the bottom right
hand corner.
This is where we could edit the text, under the controls
tab we wrote in the text we wanted we could then
change the font, size and alignment.

12. The time along the top allowed us
to see how long the documentary
was and how long each individual
clip was.
This allowed us to see our visual footage
and the sound to go with it appeared
underneath.

13. This is what we used when putting effects on to our clips. Most the
time we just used a cross dissolve and we would just simply click it and
drag it onto our clip.

14. To make the montage of images we changed the
rotation and scale of the images so that they
would all come down in different positions and in a
different place.

15. At the beginning we used a lot of special effects and clips overlapping
each other. To do this we just changed the opacity of some of the clips
so that they would overlap the others.

16. To make our double page spread we used the programme
Adobe InDesign, this was simple to use as we have already
used it before in preliminary tasks.

17. To make our drop cap for the
start of our article we changed
the number next to the drop
cap tool to 2 so that it would go
down to the size of 2 lines.

18. To create our grab quote we made a text box and put it in the
middle of our article, we then clicked on the wrap tool and this
wrapped the text around it so that the text wasn’t covering the
quote.

19. A main convention of magazine articles is that the text is positioned in
columns it was therefore important that we had ours in columns too. In
order to do this we just did a text box and put our text into it. We then
clicked on the columns tool and changed the number next to it to 3 which
gave us 3 columns.

20. As the main colour on our double page spread was a dark pink, to
ensure everything was the same colour we used the eyedropper tool to
select the colour and save it into strokes so we could then use this colour
for everything.

21. It was important that we used
striking images in our double page
spread to grab our audiences
attention. To add images we had to
click the box tool and draw a box
approximately the size we wanted
our image to be, we then went
clicked on file, and place, this
allowed us to choose the image we
would like to be placed there.

22. To make our radio trailer we used the programme Garageband. This was
easy to use as we were able to add extracts from our documentary and
we only had to add our voiceover and choose some music.

23. After we uploaded our voiceover onto garageband we had to make some
changes, such as cutting parts out that didn’t sound right or had gone
wrong during the recording stage. To do this we would click on where we
would like to cut it using this red line, we then held down command and T
and this would cut it, we would do two cuts either side of the part we didn’t
want in there, this would cut it off from the rest and then we were able to
delete this part.

24. An important part of making our radio trailer was to ensure that sound levels
were OK. We had to ensure the music wasn’t too loud and that the voiceover
and extracts weren’t too quiet so that you could hear them. We also had to
make sure the voiceover and the extracts were at a similar sound level so that
it sounded consistent.
We changed the volume of the
whole sequence using this. To change the sounds at different times we
used the track volume, we clicked on it which
created a blue dot, we could then drag this dot
up and down depending on whether we
wanted the volume louder or quieter, we did
this throughout the whole radio trailer.

25. We had to add suitable background music to our radio trailer. To do this
we clicked on the ‘eye’ button at the bottom, a box of music genres then
popped up and we clicked on different ones to look at all the different types
of music, we were then able to listen to many different tracks and decide
which ones we would like to use.
We chose a variety of chordal tracks and just put them all
together.