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

Through out the completion of our media products in the processes of researching, planning, construction and evaluating stages, we have used a wide range of media products in order to develop the best possible media products we could get. 

Research:
Most of the research process for both our music video and ancillary task was to look into other media products the same and take inspiration from these to create our own, individual products. In order to create these products, we mainly used Google and Youtube. 

 Google is a common search engine used by millions of people every day, so this was obviously a key media technology for us to use in our research as it provided us with information that we could use in our media products. 

Youtube was more helpful in the research for our music video as it allowed us to look at different music videos in the genre we were focusing on and gain an idea of what ideas we could use in our music video.






We also used many other media technologies to present our research and make sure that it was easily accessible on our blogs.

Presenting our research using Microsoft PowerPoint was another way in which we made our blogs more interactive and also easier for the audience to read. In order to place these PowerPoint's onto our blogs we used online presentation programs, such as SlideShare and SlidePub, which then gave us an embedded code to present our presentations. We also used other presentation sites, such as Prezi, to present our research and make sure that our information was easily presented to the audience yet remain interactive and easily accessible. 



Another key media technology we used was Gifmaker. Gifmaker allowed us to present different images together 
 without having a long list of pictures, thus making our blogs more interactive for the audience. This is also allowed our blog posts to be shorter, meaning that the audience wouldn't have to scroll continuously through our posts.

Planning:
Our planning process, again, required us to use a range of media technologies in order to securely plan our media products. These included technologies like Microsoft Outlook and Whatsapp.

Throughout the year, we mainly communicated through a group message on Whatsapp, an app which was available to all members of the group. We used this app to plan our filming sessions, send pictures of designs and photo's we had taken for the ancillary tasks. This app allowed us to make informed group decisions that all members could agree or disagree on as each member was included in the messages.  

As there was such a large amount of research, it had to be divided up between each members of the group. We then shared this research via Microsoft Outlook as this allowed every member of the group to receive the information easily.

When first planning our storyboard, we made a PowerPoint presentation which allowed us to easily see the timings of of the video and what we would need to do at each stage. We also created a visual storyboard using Windows Movie Maker which pictures we obtained from Google that we felt represented our storyboard well. This visual storyboard also allowed us to place our chosen song over these images and ensure that each picture matched up to the song and what we wanted to create.


For our ancillary tasks, the main planning we did was hand drawn designs. We first sketched out ideas of what we wanted to achieve and then after we had chosen our pictures, drew on these so we could get a general idea of the layout which we wanted.

Construction:

Our first ever footage was shot using our school's video camera, yet we felt that the quality of this would not allow us to achieve the music video which we wanted. Therefore, Rosie decided to buy the Fuji Film Finepix S4900 Bridge Camera, which was of a much higher quality than the other camera and also allowed us to take both the footage for our music video and pictures for our ancillary task. The camera also had the ability to change the depth of field, which from our research was shown to be something which would greatly benefit us in achieving the look we wanted in our music video. By someone in our group also owning the camera it meant we was not restricted from the school's camera being used, which would have caused problems when we were filming.


The editing for our music video was done on the program 'Serif Movie Plus'. This program allowed us to import our song and then work on a timeline for our video, which allowed us to easily match up the parts of the video that we wanted in the song. The program also allowed us to easily fade our video from black and white to colour, something which was a key feature in our video.

The ancillary tasks were all created using Abode programs, specifically Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. As we had previously used these programs in our AS coursework, we were familiar with the tools and knew how to use them. Photoshop was used to edit our pictures, where we used tools such gradient fill, blemish and lens flare to get out pictures up to the best quality. We also used tools such as the Lasso and Magic Wand to highlight an area and work around it in order to change the shape of a picture.








Illustrator and InDesign were used to create both the digi-pack and poster as we found both programs easy to design on, with adding font and perfecting the layout. Our font was initially create in InDesign, which we then copied over to Illustrator and constructed our final products there. The path tool was a key tool we used in Illustrator as it allowed us to change the path of our text, thus allowing the text to curve around the outside of the CD.



















Evaluation:

For my evaluations, I have used a range of technologies, such as SlidePub, Voki and Padlet,  in order to present my answers in a user-friendly and interactive way. These programs are familiar to me as I have used them in my previous AS coursework and also my coursework for this year. 

Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, were also used by the group in order for us to gain feedback on our products and let us know what a real audience thought of them. 

Through out both AS and A2, my coursework has been presented using Blogger. My A2 experience with Blogger has been a lot easier than that of my AS experience, due to the fact that I now have a greater understanding of how Blogger works.