Evaluation Question 4

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

This is the camera which we had access to use for our music video filming. The camera is the Canon Legria FS200, as it was a school camera the quality was not the best, but as we had no alternative we made the most of it. One good aspect of the camera was that it was very mobile as it is only a small camera and also it was very suitable for the job we needed to do. We got to grips with how the camera worked very quickly and developed our skills with it by using different techniques such as; zooming in and out, panning and a variation of different camera angles. Also the good thing about the camera was that after we had filmed a clip we could watch it back. This was because of the small screen attached to the side of the camera. Due to the fact we could watch it back it became easier to look at what had gone wrong in the clip so therefore we could shoot it again if we needed to. As well as the camera we also had to borrow a tripod from school, these were also quite temperamental and often broke while we were using them or we were given a broken one in the first place.

This is the software which we used to help us edit our music video. It is Adobe Premier Pro, it was a very good software to use and once we got to grips of how to use it, it then became very simple and effective to use. However to start with it is very hard to work because it is so detailed. Due to the fact that we used this software our music,very good and have the effects needed instead of just clip’s being shown after another clip. This software was good in the fact that the different techniques we used on there made the music video flow better. 
Other technical websites we used were blogger and Youtube. These sites have been vital in research and planning. Blogger was used to post about our whole production. It was used as a diary to post about research and planning, construction and anything else which happened in our process to complete the project throughout the year. It was simple and easy to use, we even had apps on our phones to make it more convenient to blog. It had good features to allow us to embed presentations and videos when needed which were vital to show our ideas and research. Youtube was great to research, we used other music videos to gain inspiration and to compare to ours and our ideas. We also used it to gain advice as we made Youtube channel and gained feedback and advice from the public which really helped us to progress. Again it was simple and straightforward to use we were very pleased with how reliable and easy it was to upload a video and never had problem with either sites and they were both easily accessible.

We used the internet and predominately Google to help our research and development progress and helped us analyse similar products to ours, we used it in the construction process to construct our website and Digipak, Google has always been very reliable for us and helped us overall adapted our Blog. Google allowed to gain vital information we needed for our whole media piece quickly and efficiently  this was either form research digipaks to gaining emails for production companies we may need to email. It made everything a lot more quicker and convenient for us when gaining any information we could not secure anywhere else but the internet.

We also used Prezi to present most of our ideas and presentations. This is a great website and software to use to present in a new interesting way, it allows things to be shown in a more abstract image. The way in which it works keeps the audience more engaged whilst presenting as it jumps from slide to slide in different ways and using different shapes and images. This is a lot more fun to work with and to share information than a power point  It was simple for us to make an account after our school registered on the website. Its clear instructions meant we got the hang of how it works very quickly. We then realised it had a great feature which allowed us to get the HTML so we could actually embed the presentation on our blog so that you want have to leave our blog whilst looking at it which made it convenient and an interesting feature on our blogs.

To create our website we used a website called Weebly. This website enabled us make a homepage and have tabs leading off of that to make our actual website look as good as possible. This website was easy to use and even easier to make ours website look professionally made. It had very advanced features that we were not to sure about, but the simple ones were all we needed to produce the website at the level of our standards.

To make our Digipak we used a program called Adobe Photoshop, this is a very good but technical program, with all of its functions and advanced options, at first it became slightly daunting. After a while of tweaking and trial and error we began to get used to the way in which it works. We used Youtube videos to guide us through how to use some of the settings this helped loads and allowed us to use some of the settings on Adobe that we before didn't even know how to operate. We began to get used to Photoshop and used its many options to our advantage when putting our Digipak together. We feel that the imagery and professional look we were after and we were pleased with how reliable and professional Adobe Photoshop turned out to be.