Evaluation Question : 4

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

My production is split into three areas; research and planning, the construction and the evaluation. Throughout all three stages

I used various different media technologies.

Research and Planning

In the research and planning stage I analysed real media products before planning my own. In order to do this, I used the

following media technology in order to research and plan;

• PCs - As we came back to school after the summer, the media department had been fitted with new computers. They're custom built, with Intel-i3 CPU's and 16GB or RAM, which are much better than the Apple iMacs we had beforehand, even though some people disagree. The computers we're using now are a lot quicker than the iMacs, which allows us to run programs on higher settings and handle more items/objects at the same time.

• Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 12 - Along with the new computers, they were running new editing software. Before the summer the iMacs were running Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, now they're running Sony Vegas. The class were given tutorials on how to use it by the technician which everyone seemed to have found useful. I was quite fortunate as I was used to the software after using an older version (Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9) at home.

The main effects/tools I used within Sony Vegas to create my music video were as follows:

I used the Magic Bullet Quicklooks plug-in and the effect “Crush Blue Edge” on most of the clips in my video to give the dream-like effect.

The other notable effects that I used (that I wish I hadn’t used looking back at the video now) is green screen, I used Chroma Keyer, Saturation Adjust, Colour Curves and Levels to allow me to put one image of the main character onto a background, shot in two different locations.

Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 12 - Tools

• Google Chrome - In order to access the internet I used the internet browser Google Chrome. I used this over Internet Explorer as you can log into Chrome and access all your bookmarks and favourited pages from home and as Blogger and YouTube are both products of Google accessing the sites was quicker by means of shortcuts.

• YouTube - To look at real media products in terms of music videos, I used the video sharing site YouTube, the most used and popular site of its kind on the internet. YouTube allowed me to watch real music videos from bands of my chosen genre as well as embed them onto my blog and power points as examples.

• Vimeo - I had some issues when it came to YouTube with some videos not being accessible due to copyright laws etc. When this happened, I used Vimeo which is an Australian version of YouTube which the videos were able to be accessed on.

• Prezi -To add some multimedia to my blog on posts which needed a lot of text I used Prezi to make it more interesting to read/look at. Prezi essentially adds 3D movement to a PowerPoint, which makes them a lot more interesting to look at, as well as movements to relate facts to to help you remember them.

• Smartphone - When location searching and planning the video I used my phone to take stills, upload them to social network sites to ask friends what they thought, as well as using the phone to contact and plan when I was going to film, how i'd get there using public transport etc.

• Blogger - I used blogger to record everything in posts, as I'm doing now. Blogger I found easy to use as I used it to write up and present my coursework last year too. With Blogger being owned by Google it's easy to handle information such as videos from Google's other services like YouTube.

ConstructionIn this stage, the title speaks for itself, this is where I took all my research

and plans and produced a music video, digipak and a magazine advert from them. During the construction of my music video and ancillary task, I used

the following media technologies;

• Camera (Panasonic HC-X800) - To film my video I used a HD Panasonic HC-X800 camera that records in 1080p, Full HD. It recorded straight onto an SD card which proved to be really useful as well as fast when it came to transferring clips from the card to the computer.

• Green Screen – Towards the end of the video I used the green screen so that I could layer an image on top of another, this had always been in my plans for the video since I initially started planning.

• Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator - In order to create my ancillary tasks I used Adobe Illustrator primarily, and Photoshop to add effects to the images that weren’t available on Illustrator.

Evaluation

After researching, planning and constructing my music video and ancillary tasks, I had to evaluate the whole process - what I did well, what I didn’t do so well, areas for improvement, that kind of thing.

During the evaluation I used the following media technology to produce my evaluation

• Social Networking Sites (Facebook/YouTube/Twitter) – To gain feedback for my video, I posted it up on my Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as my YouTube channel, and the schools official YouTube channel.

• Blogger - To record progress as well as right up my coursework I used Google’s blogging website ‘Blogger’. Blogger enabled us to share posts with social networking sites and with it being a Google product it integrates with YouTube well.