Evaluation - Question 4

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

There are many ways in which I used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages of my product, such as: different software in order to create my music video and ancillary texts; online software in which I have used to present my work and social media in order to contact actors.

I used many different form of software in order to create different pieces of work. One software which I used was Final Cut Pro which was an essential program which I used in order to place all of my shots for my music video in order, edit them and place the song over them, and also to create my animatic. I found this editing software quite easy to use due to previous experience in using it during my transition task from AS Media Studies to A2 Media Studies in which I replicated part of the song Someone Like You by Adele. This was very helpful for me because it gave me a chance to experiment with using Final Cut Pro and learn the basic rules on how to use it and play with the different slide transitions and effects that you can use on it such as black and white and a black border around the frame. Therefore, the things that I learnt when creating this section of an existing music video gave me confidence to use Final Cut Pro when creating my own music video at A2 as I was more familiar with how it worked and what I was able to do on it.

Another media technology that I used was Adobe Photoshop when creating my ancillary texts and my costume ideas. Photoshop allowed me to place different images onto a page, layer them up, alongside text and shapes, add effects to them and edit them to improve or change them. This software was very helpful when creating my ancillary texts because I was able to get a template of a digipak off Google and use this to place my own images on top of it to create my own digipak. I did this by opening the image of the template on Photoshop and then opening any image that I wanted to be on my digipak, decreased the opacity of the image so that I was able to see the template in the background so I knew what size to make the image, I then cropped the image down to the size that fit the template and then added any other objects that I wanted to it such as text. Photoshop made it much easier for me to create my ancillary texts and it allowed me to be more creative with what I was able to do to my images as I could add effects to them and change the opacity of images to create different effects.

Other media technologies that I used consisted of basic software such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint in order to present written work. These helped me easily show what I wanted in an orderly way that made it easy for the audience to read and understand. Other ways in which I presented my work were using online applications such as Prezi, Slideshare, GoAnimate and Emaze. These are more fun and interesting ways in which I have presented my work. The reason why I decided to use these websites is to make my work more appealing towards the audience as it makes it much more interactive and keeps the audience’s attention in. All of these websites were very easy to follow making it simple to create the items. I have used all of these different applications throughout the research and planning, construction and evaluation stages of my work as I think that they have been relevant to use throughout the whole course and I have used them when I feel they would be most beneficial such as: to show answers to surveys that I have created using a website called Survey Monkey, to answer evaluation questions, to show cast and location ideas, to present my textual analysis’ and to present information on different theorists and their ideas.

A further media technology that I have used in the planning stages of my product was social media sites such as Facebook, in particular Facebook Messenger, in order to contact my actor, actress and anyone else involved in my music video such as those providing me with props. This form of media was very helpful for me to contact others because of how global Facebook has become therefore most people use this website and spend a lot of time on it which it made it an easy and free way to contact people. Plus, this way I was able to create a conversation with all of those involved within my music video so that everyone was aware of what was happening, making me a lot more organised in planning when I am going to shoot and costume choices for example.

A basic media technology that I used during the whole project was the TV and websites such as Youtube in which I was able to watch existing music videos and gain inspiration on what to include in my own music video and also notice the type of mise-en-scene, cinematography and editing styles used in music videos to see if there were any conventions that were used so that I could apply them to my own music video. Watching music videos was a very key factor throughout not only the planning stage but the construction stage of my product as I was able to gather lots of different ideas and bring them all together to use in my music video. Some existing music videos that I took inspiration from were Chandelier by Sia and Counting Stars by One Republic which helped shape my music video more as it gave me a clear image as to what I wanted to be included in my music video, and the ideas that I gained from these music videos helped lead me onto different ideas and develop from the ones I found from the existing music videos.

Overall, I would say that I have used a wide variety of media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages of my product in order to create different pieces of work and to present my work. They have all made my blog look a lot more appealing and enticing for the audience and have made some processes much easier for me to do.