Evaluation Q4

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

All the way from the beginning of this project, from the planning and researching to producing my music video and ancillary tasks, I have used a large variety of media technologies to complete my work. The first thing I did in regards to the coursework was to create a blog to display and showcase my work using blogger.com. I have used blogger previously in my AS coursework so am familiar with the way that it works. In my opinion blogger is a brilliant technological resource to display my coursework because you can show so many different types of media in one place.

Before I could begin to produce my music video, my digipak or my magazine advert, I had to research into the range of equipment and software’s that were available to me alongside looking at similar products to those that I would be creating. I used the internet for a lot of this research, and particularly websites such as Wikipedia.org for finding information, YouTube was a very useful one to use as well, not just for researching current music videos, but also for watching tutorials on how to use adobe premiere, which is the software that I used to create my final product, and as I had limited experience using it, the tutorials were very helpful and informative. I used the online presentation software Prezi a few times during my research and planning, it allowed me to present the information that I had found in more of an interactive, fun and interesting way that just text based posts.

The construction phase of my products was where I feel that I was most reliant on technology.  I used a Canon DSLR to film my entire music video. I used multiple cameras in order to get lots of different shots without having to film for hours and hours. Once I had shot my music video, I used a card reader to export the clips onto my home drive, where I could then import them to premier. The editing software that I used to edit my music video was Adobe Premier and this allowed me to cut down each clip to the length that I needed. I could also add effects and transitions to the shots such as fades which I used at the end of my video to fade to black.

My digipak and magazine advert were both created using Adobe Photoshop CS5. I changed the brightness and contrast of my images to make them look more interesting and a nicer colour, as well as this I used the effects such as drop shadow and emboss to make the text on the magazine advert and digipak stand out more to the audience.

I feel that I have developed most in my use of the video editing software Adobe premiere. I used the CS3 version to create my drafts, but went on to use the CS6 version to create my final video, this was very helpful because the footage that I filmed was of such a high quality, that the older version of premiere struggled with it and often had errors and closed, where as CS6 didn’t cause me any problems meaning my video was a lot easier to edit.