How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation stages? During the construction of our music video we used ‘Final Cut Express’ in order to edit and piece together our final product, we were able to edit many things such as timing, length of shots, special effects and video filters. We used many tools such as the razor tool, the duplication tool, filters and effects, FX, colour adjustments and grey scales. We often used markers in order to pin certain pieces of video in order to keep the lip-syncing in place. Furthermore I myself used Photoshop extensively in order to create my digi-pack, using tolls such as dodge, burn and sponge in order to create the grey effect that is seen so frequently within our digipack. I found Photoshop very much to my liking because I am familiar with it from previous work (namely GCSE Graphic Design) which meant I had a strong base of knowledge of how to work Photoshop in order to make our ancillary texts as excellent as they could be. For example I was able to skilfully blur edges in our ancillary text, or how I was able to combine layers (something students have not been taught in media but only in graphic design). Our camera (a CanonXL2) was a key piece in creating our music video for the simple fact it was the equipment that did the actual filming. We found it easy to use and it captured a very high-resolution from a great distance meaning any long shots retained their quality. This meant that our footage looked highly professional, furthermore through using a tripod we were able to capture steady shots with no shaking with a variety of different types of shots, such as meat shots, close ups and establishing shots. During the process of creating stop motion we used the college’s camera, a Nixon. We found this an excellent camera, as it was able to take multiple shots with only one click, making sure we had at least 14FPS for our stop motion, making it a smooth and effective piece.

Whilst creating our digipack I had to research what digipack’s were like within my genre, for this I used Google extensively, I found it easy to use (as I was already highly familiar with the software) and used many images at Google’s disposal in order to make my digipack more effective. In order to upload my video I needed a popular up loader in order to upload my final product through a media that was accessible, for this I used YouTube, as I already have an account and several video’s (along with Bradley) we both found using YouTube to upload our video’s easy and simple, meaning we could upload many stages of our video’s production making sure we had many drafts in our video in order to obtain more marks. Furthermore we also used YouTube to see what the genre we were working within had to offer, what conventions it used and how our video should be seen and therefore be ‘interpreted’ by the audience. During the research and planning stage of our music video I used many products in order to present my work on my blog, programmes such as Prezi, Slidershare (the very program this file will be uploaded to), Microsoft Word/Powerpoint and ItunesMovieMaker were all very integral in the creation and presentation of my research and planning for Misery.

During our class evaluation the use of the interactive whiteboard in order to show our video to many people at once was integral to gain thorough feedback from our rough draft of our video and show us how to proceed in developing our final product to an even better standard, this helped incredibly as it meant we could gain large amounts of feedback in one sitting. David Leighton