Question 4

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

Displaying the work

My media blog was the most useful device to display my work and easily update its current stage and the progress being made. 

It was easily accessible throughout the year and saved me having to carry around heavy folders and papers and keep my research and planning organised with the use of Labels. The teacher's ability to leave comments and constructive feedback on the blogs also incredibly helped the process. 

Research for Music Video and Digipack

Finding my band 

Most of my research was done with the use of the Internet. 

I browsed through various unsigned band websites, but mainly my source was youtube. In the end I chose to ask my friend Nick if he and his band The Upgrade were willing to be part of this media project.

Digipack + Advert

The Internet, mainly websites like Google Images and Wikipedia was very useful in accessing images of past albums and their release dates/ genre specification and lead me on to similar artists.

For the research concerning my magazine advert however I relied mostly on print magazines since the internet websites of these magazines do not always show adverts for upcoming albums and singles.

Music Video

Youtube enabled me to watch past music videos by old and current bands who were very influential in the process of making this video.

The TV (also on demand catch up TV websites like BBC iPlayer) and DVDs were useful to the research to watch documentaries about bands and media-related films like the Kitchen Sink Dramas that influenced our work, and the feature film about Joy Division called Control.  

Planning

Websites like Facebook were also incredibly useful in arranging a shooting schedule with the band and the media "crew", since it would have otherwise been even harder to cooperate between 6 people's timetables and activities.

  Microsoft Office programmes such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel were extremely helpful to create files, tables and lists (for ex. Shot list/shooting schedule) and have an overview on the situation and progress.

Since at home I use a MacBook Pro computer, I had to convert files from Microsoft to Open Office or iWork 08. This was easy to do and made a wider range of programmes accessible to me.

I used the scanners which my school offered me to make a virtual copy of  the storyboard, which I had drawn onto paper, and publish it on my blog.

Construction

Music Video

I used an HD digital Canon video camera to film the footage for my music video. The touch screen technology of the camera was easy to use and its use of Memory Card rather than a tape meant we didn't risk accidentally filming over a scene and didn't have to keep fast forwarding or rewinding the tape.

The High Definition quality was perfect to create a professional looking music video. 

The editing was done with Adobe Premiere Pro. I didn't use many special effects and when I came down to the actual editing I didn't feel the need to lower the saturation or turn it black and white like I had originally planned to do because I felt the colour fitted nicely with the jokey outtake scenes in the video with music and the colourful lighting on the stage in the performance shots made the footage more interesting to the eye and more exciting to watch. 

I contemplated editing with iMovie, which was the programme I used to edit my thriller for last years AS part of the media A-level, but then decided that the facilities and the layout on Premiere Pro was better suited and easier to understand.

I chose mostly not to use transition editing because I liked the quick and sudden cut from scene to scene. It emphasises the speed editing nicely and makes it look more exciting rather than if the scenes were slowly fading into each other.

Digipack

I shot the photographs for the digipack with a SONY HD DSC-HX200V Cyber-shot Camera.

The editing for my digipack was attained through a combination of programmes. The school offered me to use Adobe photoshop to edit the photographs I had taken, which was my main editing programme. However I also used Apple's iPhoto on my personal computer to crop, flip and annotate the pictures, which I then uploaded to a USB memory stick and transferred to the Microsoft-operated school computers.

Evaluation

Social Networking websites such as Facebook and twitter were very useful in gaining immediate feedback from a wide audience or at wish a selected audience. 

The available Blog archive our school has set up was also of use and helped inspire and guide us and if we ever didn't understand a certain part of a question maybe look at what past students had written or how they had laid their work out.

The screenshot function on my MacBook Pro made it very easy to screenshot certain scenes from youtube videos and upload them to my blog.