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

I have used media technologies in every stage of production and presentation for everything I have produced in the whole course. They have been necessities in everything I have done. Media technologies I had utilised have ranged from really good quality editing programmes such as adobe Photoshop and adobe premier pro to free social networking sites such as facebook and twitter where I have received audience feedback on my work.

Here is a list of all the media technologies I have used in my A2 advanced portfolio:

• Youtube
• Google
• Wikipedia
• Facebook
• Blogger
• Photoshop
• Picnik
• Spotify
• Itunes
• Amazon
• Premier Pro
• Powerpoint
• Microsoft Word

I used these technologies to create the best possible work I could have done. I used them all to do different things to create my work.

 

I used YouTube in my researching and the presentation on my video as the final format was uploaded onto facebook and therefore a huge audience could view it. I used it for researching because it is very simple to use and has millions upon millions of videos uploaded onto it. Therefore I could find what I was looking for very quickly, it is also very quick to load and I could pause it at any point very accurately to get screen shots for my research and development. The advantage of using YouTube is that I had a huge amount of access to all kinds of different British hip hop tracks and also every other genre you could think of, the main downside of this technology however is that there are also quite a few fan made videos that take a while to sift through to get to the video you want to watch.

Google in my opinion is the very best search engine that can be used. It is very simple to use, very fast and powerful and the majority of the time you don’t get the spam that you get on may other search engines. I used google in my research and planning of my video and ancillary tasks. It was very helpful for me to look at the genre in more detail and read other peoples views of the audience and the genre. The great advantage to using google over any other search engine is the simplicity it gives you and the speed at which it works, I cant really find a drawback to using the technology only that sometimes you have to be very specific with your search requests. By using google I completed really useful research on all of my tasks ad found really useful examples of similar media products to my own.

 

Wikipedia was the technology I used to research the origins of my genre, it is a very useful factual encyclopaedia and I found it very useful for researching how british hip hop came about. It is simple to use and will always give you what you are looking for. It is very good for helping you to understand things and to gain knowledge on any subject. The major drawback however is that there are major rumours about the quality and reliability of the information on the page as a lot of it is user written.

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook, one of the largest social networking sites, was very beneficial for me to gain audience feedback. Not only did I post my video and pictures of the poster and digipak to gain comments from my friends but I also posted statuses about the genre and ideas for people not in my class. This is very useful as it gave me a much wider spectrum of feedback that wasn’t all about technical codes. The great advantage about using facebook is that is is very simple and unlike twitter it is possible to write more that 160 characters on a comment or post, this meant that people could give me more feedback then they would have on one post on twitter. The biggest drawback with using facebook for this is that only my friends could view the video, this means that not a huge amount of people can see the video and I could not get the viewing figures I wanted for a large amount of feedback.

Blogger is probably the media technology I used the most of all. It is a website in which you can create a blog for yourself to post anything you want. We use it at school to post our research and planning and our evaluations and our finished products. It is very easy to use and you can change privacy settings etc. to make it completely secure. As a result of everybody using it, we can comment on each others blog posts and read what each other has written, not to copy their work but for a sense of healthy competition and to share ideas with each other as after all, all our projects are very different and because we were working individually we needed to help each other as much as we could. Blogger is very useful as it is very simple and does exactly what we wanted it to do, it also enables us to give feedback and receive feedback. There are however drawbacks to the blogs, they don’t let you just upload windows documents and when writing on the blog there is no spell check so silly mistakes can be made without being picked up on.

 

 

 

Photoshop is the programme I used to edit the still images for the poster and the digipak. It is a notouriously tricky piece of software to use as a novice editor (me when I started). As a result I really struggled with the technology at first and needed a lot of help from people in my class to help me get to grips with the software. It is a very good programme as it makes it possible to change and adapt the product to what you want it to look like and it makes it easy to edit out imperfections and therefore creates the perfect article. The main benefit of using this technology is that you can improve your product in so many different ways and for a more experienced editor there is a huge range of different tools to edit your product. The huge issue I found with the product was that it was so difficult to work with and as a result I spent a lot of my time working on Photoshop.

 

 

 

 

Picnic was without a doubt my favourite piece of media technology to use, it is so simple yet gives a really good quality image at the end of the editing process. I used it for both the poster and the digipak, the programme let you sharpen the whole image or parts of it at a time, you could fix blemishes on the picture and eliminate red eye. It was very simple to add text to the photographs and there were various texts with wide spectrums of colours for the text. The great advantage I gained from using the programme was the quality that could be achieved with such simplicity, if you have a photo that doesn’t need drastic work or to cut out a segment of a picture then it is great to use. The main problem with the programme however is that there is no where near as may tools that can be used as there is on Photoshop and therefore a really good editor would be able to create a better image on Photoshop and for that reason I used picnic to do the easy editing and then I used Photoshop when picnic couldn’t give me what I needed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used spotify and itunes to save the track on my laptop and ipod so that I could play it at the different locations so that the actor could lip sink in time with the music, both programmes are very good to use, I prefer to use itunes when on set as it is really quick to get up and on my laptop for some reason plays a lot louder than spotify.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would also use itunes spotify and also amazon to sell the product, by using all three I can reach all customers and hopefully make more sales for the artist. It would be safe to say however that Itunes is by far the most popular.

I used Premier pro alone to edit the video. At the start of year 12 I found it very difficult to use but thanks to previous projects I am fairly useful with it now. It is fairly simple to used and is very good when using after effects to get the best quality out of the video. I didn’t however use many after effects on my video, this is because the genre of my video is very independent and by putting on fancy after effects the video appears less independent and more of a larger budget video. It is a very useful and fairly quick software to use and when used effectively it can be very precise. It can on the other hand take a while to load and does have the tendency to crash and work can be lost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used PowerPoint for one of my evaluations, I used it because I’m very familiar with the product and for me it was very easy to create what I wanted to. The benefit of using PowerPoint for me is that it is very clear and very quick to get it right. The drawback to using Power is that it is very generic and all PowerPoints look fairly similar.

Microsoft word was very useful when doing blog posts and my evaluations, I wrote the evaluations on word then put them onto other programmes to present them. It is very useful for me because my spelling can be bad and it has a very good spell check and it is also very good because it helps to create a structure for the blog post and I can plan where pictures will go. The main disadvantage to it is that I have to copy and paste the posts into blogger and sometimes it doesn’t work so well