How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?Question 4

For the beginning stages of this project, the main technology which I constantly used was google and YouTube. This enabled me to research existing music videos from YouTube which further allowed me to understand the conventions of music video to use and challenge in my own work. music video. In order to present my work it took screenshots of existing music videos in the genre we choice for our own video. Through YouTube I could thoroughly analysis the videos from shot to shot. This made it easier to recreate certain shots which we found effective. Google also allowed me to access digipaks and websites of other artists which help us gain inspiration for own digipak and website.

• . I also used google for research such as theories(audience and star theory), music over time and how it has changed, and even debates on how role models are impacting audiences. . Directors of music video was another major research point I looked at as this helped me to identify techniques which we were able to apply to our own music video.

• Research of theories was mainly obtained from google as well, I was able to search in depth of what certain theories were, who discovered these theories and how I could apply this to my music product. I used theories such as the star theory, audience theory, Laura Mulvey's ‘male gaze’, and Anthony Giddens ‘self identity’.

• To record my research I used created a blog on blogger. This helped me to organise my research, planning and production into separate subheadings. A blog was also useful as it recorded the date of when each post was published this shows the progression of my work as I build it up to my final products

• When presenting my work on my blog is used various types of media such as slide share, Schribd, Prezi, and Movie maker. I found that these were all extremely easier to use and that worked well in presenting my work. I also used blogger last year so I was familiar with how to use it and decided this was the best option for this year. I found that the issues I has last year with blogger was no longer a problem as I knew how to resolve them this time. Slide share allowed me to upload presentation I made on PowerPoint which I then was able to embed on my blog. I felt that PowerPoints were a more interesting way of presenting my work rather than block texts in a regular blog post as this tended to look boring. I used Prezi and Schribd for these same reasons, I particularly used them for my digipak analysis and website analysis as it was a better way of presenting blocks of text.

• For the actual filming of our music video we used a digital cameras. We brought to cameras to where we were filming in case one ran out of battery, and did end up using both cameras. We used a Samsung and canon cameras, both worked effectively and produced the same quality footage which meant our video looked more professional. We obviously didn’t have any professional equipment for the lighting so we had to improvise in using torches on our phones and chose a setting which has appropriate lighting for example the natural lighting from the window.

• After we finished filming our music video we uploaded all the clips onto the mac desktop. However we did have a number of problems uploading the clips as we found that we could only edit on the same computer, this led to difficulties in doing extra work outside of class when that particular computer was not available. As a solution to this we planned in advance when we would be able to work outside of class in order to meet the deadline.

• In the editing stages of our music vide, we used adobe premier pro. Since this was the same editing software to what we used last year we knew had to use it already. Therefore the problems we faced last year wasn’t an issue this year as we knew how to resolve them. I think that our music video shows a progression from last year as we have used a variety of effects such as blank and white, speed effects, slow motion, and several transitions. We major problem we came across when finishing our video was that we were unable to render it which meant that when you watch it from the beginning it was jumpy in parts and the music cut out. This was then followed by another problem of exporting the video. At first we tried to use tutorials to fix it ourselves but unfortunately this didn’t work. We eventually got help from ICT who were able to fix it for us.

• We also used Photoshop for our digipak pictures in order to create the effects such as the pencil effect, we wanted to make our images look as professional as possible. I've never used Photoshop before but found tutorials on the internet to self teach me how to use it, again using another resourceful technology. For the images of the digipak we used the same camera as we wanted to produce the same quality. For our website we used wix to create it, we found that this was extremely easy to use as it allowed you to pick a design and layout suitable to our band. It also already had most common features of a website which we needed, this again was a reason into why wix was so easy to use