DRAFT: Evaluation Question 4

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

                

Technology has played a crucial role from the very start of the course, it has helped us communicate on an instant level where we are able to get a hold of each other whenever we wanted. Whether if it was discussing new ideas and concepts that had popped into our heads when we weren’t with each other, it gave us a good foundation for us to work on

For our music video, we were able to use a variety of technologies which helped us to achieve the result we wanted. I would say that the backbone of the whole video making process was the use of Blogger, this let us publish our own individual ideas that could be incorporated into the video itself. We were also able to see different ideas each one of us had and take influences from each other to create the piece of work we wanted. For our research and planning, we published posts that expressed the thoughts and ideas we had at the time, the positive points about Blogger is that it allows you to embed pictures and videos from Youtube and other online video platforms to support the ideas you wanted to portray. The most important online media platform we used for communicating o one another was Twitter, this was a practical choice because it allowed to communicate with each other in and outside of school when we weren’t with each other. Another positive aspect of twitter was that there is an app available for smartphones, which gave us instant communication as the tweets would come instantaneously and we would be able to tweet back with a number of minutes. As we had planned to feature shots of London in the video, technology has us in a huge way in terms of organizing and planning the trip. We used the internet to find out the cheapest hotel and train fares so we could save money and use that for our time there, the internet also helped find out what the weather was going to be like in London at the time, this was a crucial aspect of the video as we wanted to portray London as this gloomy and lonely city.

For the making of our video, we used a FujiFilm SLR camera which gave us the opportunity to shoot the shots in HD. This offered high quality shots, which we thought would make the overall appearance of the video more professional and high quality. The camera was also lightweight and featured a strap which we could put around necks for extra safety and support as walking around London with an expensive camera wasn’t particularly a good idea. After we had shot our videos, the transfer from the camera to the computer was very easy as all of the clips had been saved to a memory card; the computers which we used for our editing did not have a memory card reader so we had to acquire one by buying one off the internet. The transfer was fairly fast and easy to do, we made sure that we had a backup of the shots we had done so far so we used an external-hard drive to put the clips onto incase anything happened to the memory card.

To edit our video, we chose to use Adobe Premiere Elements that was available on the school computers. We chose to use the computers at school because they were far more faster than the ones we had at home, at first, we were hesitant when it came to using Premiere as we hadn’t had any experience with the software before. But after experimenting with the software, we become very compatible and allowed us to edit the clips and shots we had. This particular video editing software had a very friendly user interface where we could easily navigate to the clips we wanted and we were also able to cut the clips easily as well. Premiere also had a variety of video settings where we were able to change the appearance of our clips, for example in our video, we chose to use the Black & White filter that was available, we thought that this was effective because it portrayed the dark gloomy isolation we wanted to convey to the audience watching it.

The images I used for my Digipak and Poster were shot by the same camera I had used to shoot the music video; this particular camera gave crisp and clear high quality images of the city shots I wanted to put in my digipak and poster. The editing software I had used for both products was Adobe Photoshop Elements, I already had some experience with this software as I had already used it in my AS year of Media Studies so when it came to making the actual products, I knew exactly what I was doing when it came to what I wanted to do on the program. I found that this program gave me a variety of different methods to achieve the product I wanted, it offers a range of artistic effects you can apply to the images that would make it more interesting to look at.