Evaluation Question 4

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


Media technologies were used extensively throughout the construction, research, planning and evaluating stages of my project. Firstly I used the web browser Mozilla Firefox to research existing artists, their websites and general information on making a music video using the browser. Firefox is known as having a lower risk of experiencing problems such as unexpected crashes and viruses, This made research less stressful for me as I knew I was protected from unexpected problems. Firefox also has an inovative tabbed browser system, built in pop up ad blocking and a page bookmarking service which I found saved me a lot of time. Firefox also has a useful location search which meant I could easily find where I needed to travel and how long it would take in order to reach filming locations.

YouTube was also a useful tool for me, it offered free, instant videos which I could watch for research on existing music videos. I could also use YouTube as a video hosting website so that I could publicly distribute my finished music video and evaluation to the public. It is also the second largest search engine in the world with 4 billion views of videos daily, meaning I would have a larger audience base to watch my finished project.

I used my email (Google Mail) several times throughout my project in situations such as contacting my dancers. I found it easy to use and very effective as it had sorting features which meant I could sort emails into various folders for organizational purposes. It was also instant and very popular meaning I could contact every one I needed and would get responses very quickly. The social networking site Facebook allowed me to contact other dancers. And SlideShare was used by me to upload PowerPoints to the internet for my evaluation and research stages.

A Panasonic HC-V210 was used during the filming and construction stages of my video and evaluation. I found the Panasonic to be very useful as it was simple to use, lightweight and compact, and had a long battery life. This meant filming was relatively stress free as I didn't have to focus on how the camera was performing and instead just focus on filming the subject. A useful feature of the Panasonic was also the twist able display, which meant I could film people at different angles whilst easily monitoring what footage I was recording without effecting the quality by constantly moving the camera to see the screen. One problem I did come across with the camera however was that the quality was al little low and I would of preferred it to be of higher quality in order to get better quality images into my video. I also used a Velbon DV-7000 tripod which was stable and had a fluid base so that the movements of the camera were smooth and I used a SanDisc Ultra Card which was used to store my captured footage.

Blogger was used a lot throughout my project. It provided me with a unique and stylish way to present my coursework using many different media types to keep it interesting such as text, videos, images and links. The helpful interface meant that I could easily edit my posts whenever I wanted.

Final Cut Pro X was my only editing software when creating my music video and evaluation and it never let me down. I found all the tools really easy to learn and were very effective in creating a good quality video. Since my video needed a lot of editing the cuts between shots on the beat of the music, I found the blade tool immensely important to me. Furthermore the program easily let me sort out all of my "rough footage" into organized files so that I could retrieve them when I needed. In the end the video could be easily exported using Final Cut Pro.

During the stages of my ancillary text production I used Weebly, Photoshop and InDesign. Weebly was a free to use, website creator and hosting service. I found it invaluable during the production of my artists website as it had templates and easy to use tools that meant I could develop the templates into exactly what I needed. Photoshop allowed me to develop my editing skills further by offering us a very good quality and extensive program to edit my pictures to fit the needs of my digipak. I did however find Photoshop very hard to use with its many different tools that were hard to find. Lastly InDesign allowed me to create a very good quality digipak. InDesign had a good layout and process of placing images into the right positions so that I could create a professional looking digipak.