Evaluation
Question 4
Web 2.0 technologies have led to audiences becoming prosumers
on the internet rather than purely consumers. In the past, the internet had
been designed for the average person to consume the information and media it
produced, as it was expensive and complicated to produce content and upload it.
In more recent years the accessibility of technologies such as decent quality
cameras, tripods, fast internet connections and high powered computers have
helped to create this content to a high standard. These computers often run free
programmes such as IMovie or Movie Maker that come pre-loaded on the device).
Interactive sites such as YouTube and blogger make putting your work, ideas and
opinions on the internet easier than ever, almost anyone can do it. We used
both blogger and YouTube during our coursework as prosumers to upload our
videos, and embed and publish them to our blogs. We as a group were able to
rent high quality cameras, tripods, and SD cards from the sixth form to allow
us to create our content, and used software provided to edit and make it a high
standard. This is just something that was not readily available in an
educational setting this time 25 years ago, mainly due to expense.
Technologies:
Blogger: Blogger
is the main medium in which I made my work accessible to the public, it allows
users to publish text, pictures, embedded videos and games to the internet on a
blog for free. It is relatively simple to use although can be confusing when
you have more than one blog. I accidentally uploaded work to the wrong blog several
times during production, but this is easily fixable when you do notice it.
Blogger also has some issues with uploading photos and copy and pasting. If you
copy and paste images directly onto your post, they often disappear but don’t
allow you to put text in the space instead, so it is quite long winded to have
to download each image and upload it to blogger. Saying this, when you have
uploaded photos correctly and embedded videos, it can look very effective.
Prezi: Prezi is
an online piece of software that allows you to create slideshows. It is a more
advanced version of PowerPoint, and has much more aesthetically pleasing
transitions and designs. Again, Prezi is free to use but you can upgrade to a
better account for more themes and other things. I like using Prezi a lot as
you can edit your slideshow path, so if you need to add further information in
after you have done many slides; it is very easy to just put them in where you
want them. An issue I had with Prezi was the size. I often started with my
slides being large, but as they’re all on one page, and get zoomed in and out
of, the more I added the smaller they had to be to fit them all in.
Premiere Pro:
Premiere Pro is the editing software we used to edit our film and the audio
that went along with it. Most of my group were very inexperienced with this
software but luckily Ryan was very familiar with other Adobe programmes such as
Photoshop and After Effects, and showed us how to use it to a good standard,
and fast (by using keyboard shortcuts). I found Premiere Pro very easy and
logical to use most of the time once I had got a grasp of it, but things such
as the effects you can add on top of the video to give them certain effects
(such as black and white or sepia) still confused me. The transitions between
the clips were easy to use and look effective, by either adding the
pre-existing transitions from the side bar or drawing your own fades.
Photoshop:
Photoshop and premiere Pro are within the same software package, except I used
photoshop to edit photos rather than video, but all of the keyboard shortcuts
and the layout of the programmes are very similar. It is another programme that
is provided by the Sixth form to students for free, but the Adobe package
usually costs around £80 a year. One problem I had with Photoshop was I kept
accidentally rasterizing text layers and therefore making the words uneditable.
I wouldn’t notice this when doing it but it caused lots of problems further
down the line, luckily this is easily fixable as long as you remember what font
you used. I discovered the camera raw filter which allows you to change the
colour balance of photos, and make them brighter, darker or more saturated. I
also used the ‘liquify’ effect to edit the eyes on my poster to make them
bigger, giving her a slightly possessed look which I think was very effective.
Slideshare and
Flipsnack: Slideshare is another online programme that allows you to upload
word documents and PowerPoints onto an online ‘book’, and embed them into your
blog. It is a very similar programme to flipsnack but has a slightly different
user experience and allows you to have different themes and other variations. I
had some problems with both Slideshare and Flipsnack with actually logging into
my account, but once it worked it was very good and easy to use. I think that
using these forms of media to put information on my blog helps it look
interesting and keep my reader focused.
Youtube: YouTube
is a website which people can use to be prosumers and upload their own video
content to, as well as consumers viewing others videos. I used YouTube as a
consumer AND a prosumer by finding videos of things like movie trailers to
embed into my blog as evidence to my points, but also to upload my work to so I
could embed it onto my blog to be publicly viewable. YouTube is easy to use and
user friendly, and I really didn’t have any problems with it. Using YouTube was
really helpful for me when gathering feedback, as I could easily show others my
work. I also used YouTube to upload the responses I got from my audience
watching my draft trailer.
Word: Word is
really easy to use for me as I’ve used it from a young age, and makes getting
your ideas down quick and easy. It’s also good for writing your posts and using
things like spell check before copying and pasting your work into Blogger. Word
is great for getting your ideas down easily but doesn’t format very well when
it comes to photos, so its not ideal to export as a JPEG and embed onto your
blog as the photos will often move.
Emaze: Emaze is
an online publishing software that is similar to Prezi or Flipsnack but it has
other unique features that the others don’t have. I used this software to
create a kind of quiz game to make my blog interactive, it was quite difficult
to get my head round the basic coding involved in making the game as I’ve never
done any of this before but, once I had got the hand of it, it was very easy
and effective. The preset presentation forms that come with Emaze as standard
offer an additional dimension to say, prezi.
Google Forms: Google
Forms is what my group used to do our audience research about our synopsis,
like an online questionnaire. It’s quite simple to use and allows you to edit
or remove questions after it has been published, so if you notice a mistake you
don’t have to start again like you do on Survey Monkey. It was also good
because it allows you to edit your results when making graphs from them. We
noticed we had some silly answers on our questionnaire so we removed them and
made sure to mention the removed anomalies.
The technologies I have used have helped develop my skills,
creativity and knowledge by giving me opportunities to learn to create things I
wouldn’t have been able to before. For example, firstly, presenting my work on
an online forum, Blogger, allowed me to embed presentations, photos and videos
into my work, which is something I wouldn’t have been able to do if I had
presented my work in paper form (which is what I usually do for other subjects)
and before using Flip Snack, Emaze or Prezi, I would’ve usually just presented
my work straight onto blogger or through word or powerpoint. Using these
alternative mediums I have developed my IT skills and allowed myself to be more
creative with the presentation of my work than I would’ve been before. Using
Adobe products has helped develop my skills in editing video as well as just
still images. In the first year of Media I learned to use photoshop which has a
very similar interface as Premiere Pro, this made it easy to adapt to this
software and learn new skills.
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