How did you use media technologies in the

construction and research, planning and evaluation

stage?

Research and PlanningThe internet was a useful tool during the research and planning stage, giving me access to

video-hosting websites such as Youtube, which provided me with direct access to a range of music videos past and present. With the developing “Media 2.0” allowing normal people to now contribute to media instead of simply consume it, I was also able to

observe other effective but amateur-made music videos (as was the case when I drew my inspiration from Youtube blogger Charlie McDonnell’s music video). With interactivity

across the technologies, I was then able to take a video from Youtube, and then embed it in places like blogger.com.

Social networking was also useful at this stage, as it gave me the most direct contact to our target audience, which we’d decided would be people of around our age – already being connected with these people online, I was able to easily observe them as well as interact

and gather feedback from them.

I also had to use a digital Nikon camera to take photos of possible locations, which I then in turn edited on Photoshop.

Print ProductionWith my print production work, I chose to use Photoshop for its superiors abilities in photo/image manipulation, as well as its various tools. Its “layers” functions allowed me to layer my various texts on top of photos which I had edited, particularly using brightness and contrast tools, in order to ensure they looked their best, and colour selection tools allowed me to ensure I had the same colour palette thoughout my work.

I found that the application of pen graphic tablet technology to this work was particularly helpful – its pressure sensitivity meant that it was much easier to draw onto my pieces and was generally much easier to use than a mouse.

Video ProductionOur music video was organised through several

technological means, the first of which being the calendar provided by the Microsoft

Outlook Web App. With options to calendar share, it meant that me and my partner as well as others taking part could observe times and

dates for the filming.

We also communicated through social networking site Facebook, chatted over MSN Messenger and texted using mobile phones in order to keep each other up to date. The Facebook

“Event” option was particularly useful, allowing us to contact a wide range of people and

display the information clearly and easily, as well as be notified when people responded,

but for me, owning a phone with no internet, my only portable form of communication was

to phone and text.

We shot the video with my HD video camera – the college’s superior HD cameras were limited,

and we were unable to obtain one for the entire duration of filming. If we had have

acquired one, it would have meant we had more control over the focus – my camera only had auto-focus. However, though the camera

dictates the visual quality, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the overall quality of the

work.

Post-ProductionWe edited our video together using

Adobe Premier Pro, and it could be argued that this new technology (relatively new to us as users), dictated how our final work was presented – this is called technological determinism. We found this limiting to our creativity, as what we wanted, due to our relatively small knowledge of the program, we couldn’t always achieve properly. However, sometimes this was remedied with the help of internet search engines such as Google, which helped us locate tutorials for techniques such as splitscreen, which we eventually used in our video.

Premier was particularly useful in allowing us to layer different clips on top of each other, allowing smooth clip transitions – its range of functions allowed us to apply colour filters and effects filters to our work.

EvaluationThe range of media available has made it easy to

gather feedback and present an evaluation of my work. I gathered some of my audience feedback from friends online, both through Facebook and

online conferencing/chat host tinychat.com – useful interactive sources. Others, I filmed using a

video camera, and edited using Premier Pro.

My evaluation has been put together using many different forms of digital technology – the online presentation website Prezi is useful for creating

animated presentations, with easy ways to embed Youtube clips. Photoshop allowed me to easily

compare and contrast different characteristics of each of my created media texts by allowing me to put them alongside each other and, using colour

selection and displaying different fonts, explain my creative process. Powerpoint documents, whilst in

the past unable to be shared online, now have online hosts such as slideshare.com which enable

such documents to be uploaded and viewed on the internet – it seems the ability to access new types of information over the internet is still growing.