‘How did you use media technologies in the

construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?’

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.

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.

Wordle 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.

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.

Voicethread 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. I then went onto use Voicehthread for my

evaluation question 1.

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.

Youtube 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.

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.

Evernote 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.

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 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 is a more creative and design based form of

Powerpoint and allows you to create interactive

PowerPoints. I used this during my research into existing

conventions of the Rock genre in music videos.

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 editing

Stages of the project.

I 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 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.