Evaluation Question 4‘How did you use media

technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation

stages?’

Introduction From the advent of our media course the use of

modern media technology has been at the forefront of our work. Throughout the course I have been experimenting with different programmes, technologies and services to help develop my personal skills to adapt to new situations as the ever evolving media and film industry requires.

Canon EOS 600D The pin sharp quality of The Canon EOS 600D digital SLR camera

ensured clean and crisp images throughout our project. However, when it came to loading the images we had taken in Final Cut Express, there was a notable drop in image resolution. Though we at first thought that this was at fault on the cameras we later learnt that this can be where there is not sufficient RAM present in the computers to cope with the image quality that the Canon is capable of capturing. The Canon was used during the planning stages when we were scouting locations, creating an animatic of our storyboard and during discussions between my team members and myself. During the production stages of our music video the camera was a constant part of filming and taking evidence of work done.

WordleWordle is a tool that allows you to enter words into a text area and then takes all of these words and creates a mood board out of all of them, allowing you to edit the angles of the text, the positioning and colours of the letters. This adds to the overall feel and creates a noteworthy mood board, it contributed greatly to our work on several occasions including our pitch presentation.

Slideshare

Slide share is an online service that allows you to upload your slideshows for others to view and download and allows you to do the same. Slideshare was used during the planning and preparation stages of our work and is being used now to allow this slideshow to appear on my blog.

VoicethreadVoicethread is an online application that allows its users annotate slideshows or images for all to see. Voicethreads can vary in topic and may be creative or descriptive and even has social network potential, though its interface made it appear to be a fairly mediocre site in terms of capability. I did attempt to use this for an analysis task but decided to instead type out the task due to the problems stated above.

Blogger The site, blogger, has been a useful tool throughout our music video project allowing each member of my class to create both individual and group blogs allowing us to share our progress with our team mates as well as providing an archive of our preliminary research. We used this throughout our project to document our research as well as our progress.

YoutubeYoutube is an enormous online video sharing site that has assisted us throughout our project, using you Youtube we were able to post videos and look at the response of the public, for example views or likes. Although I believe Google Plus somewhat limits the capability of the site for group users as accounts are now linked.

IMac Versions G5 and G6 The Mac computers are very capable machines and have ensured that we are able to complete our work to the best of our abilities, they were used at every stage throughout our project and acted as a home point for all of our work. However, the Macs did struggle with some tasks due not containing sufficient RAM to play our initial filming in the high defintion the Canons were filming in, however this problem was solved and Final Cut Express ensured we were able to create our finished product.

EvernoteEvernote is an online note taking tool that allows you to annotate web pages and pictures with possible ideas. I have used it in the post production stages a little more for the annotation and sharing of my notes on the initial cover designs.

Microsoft Office

Though the majority of technical work was completed on the IMacs, some Photoshop and image manipulation although most work was completed using either Word or Powerpoint which both allowed me to create professional looking documents throughout the process.

Gmail

Gmail is an online email service that allowed us as a group to communicate ideas as well as the progress that we’d made, in the form of videos or images. The only disadvantage would be the limit on video sizes that Gmail is capable of sending. Gmail was an application that we used throughout our project.

Prezi

Prezi is a more creative and design based form of Powerpoint and allows you to create interactive Powerpoints. I used this during my reseach into existing conventions of the Rock genre in music videos.

Final Cut Express

Final Cut Express was the editing software we used when creating our music video. Final Cut Allows the user to work along a time line and add or delete footage where they need to, it also allows users to place an audio file underneath a video file enabling us to accurately lip sync our song to our footage. One disadvantage of Final Cut Express was the fact that when you removed one clip it would sometimes move all of your clips back along the timeline and thus, out of sync. Final Cut Express was used throughout the editingStages of the project.

Video convertersI used video convertors throughout the research process to ensure that I had all of the videos I needed without the need for internet, enabling me to complete certain tasks that I would have not been able to complete otherwise. Sometimes image quality was an issue with different converters but on a whole they were easy to use, fast and reliable.

Photoshop Photoshop is an online photo manipulation and editing software that enables the user to do a multitude of things to an image to entirely change its properly and ultimately it’s look. I used Photoshop in the post production stages of my project to create the initial covers for the CD case. I did find that although I had used previous versions of Photoshop, I found that it was fairly difficult to pick up again due to the change in interface and locations for certain tools.