Evaluation, Question 4

This is my evaluation with the 4 questions being headed at the start of each post and I do apologise for the images having to be at the bottom but them go in numerical order from top to bottom but this was the only way I could get the images onto the blog as I exhausted all other possible solutions

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

New media technology proved to be a great help when creating this project all the way from start to finish, it wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the media technology. The actual documentary itself required new technology to what I had previously got to know throughout last year such as a PMD660 (see Figure 8) used to record the voiceover by Toby Marshall. I found piece of equipment very simple to use at it simply required batteries to use and a microphone which was just plugged in by an XLR cable, the PMD660 didn’t cause us any problems during our process. There was however, new elements of new media technology that I had previously not encountered which caused us some difficulty; our website (see Figure 9). The website, which was implemented in order to give the public a greater insight into our documentary, contains our radio trailer and newspaper article as well as links to our group and individual blogs. The problem we encountered with the website is that of putting links onto the website and creating a background for the website. There was a limited selection of ways you could set out the website due to restrictions being placed upon it because it is only a free domain, these preset template were not to our liking however so we ended up wasting time looking for different way in which to get around this before finally giving up and settling on one of the preset templates. Another piece of new hardware that we had to learn to use was the clip tie microphone (see Figure 10) which was used in all our interviews by being placed under the subjects top and clipped to the neck area of their clothing in order the get a crisper, clearer sound than using the shotgun microphone that was go used to last year. We did not experience any problems with the clip tie microphone until it came to interviewing WPC Lawrence and her microphone didn’t work so although I recorded using the built in microphone of the Sony DVCAM PD170 which we used last year we still needed to re-film in which the microphone worked well. In addition, there was the piece of new media technology that we encountered this year as opposed to last which was the audio uploading software SoundCloud (see Figure 11) on the internet. This software was used to upload our radio trailers onto so they could be link with our website and give the audience a chance to hear them. Finally, a new, somewhat annoying piece of software became indispensible when editing my newspaper article; GIMP (see Figure 12). Although I found this annoying and hard to use throughout I also saw it as an invaluable tool when it came to editing as without paying for programs such as Photoshop there is no other way to edit the images to the specifications I desire. In conclusion, I believe I used new media technology very well throughout and even if I did find some elements hard I tried and succeeded to overcome them.