Evaluation Question 4 draft

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

There was a variety of technologies that we used throughout the process of making our media products. We began the whole course by setting up our blogs, we did this by using the website Blogger run by Google. Blogger allows us to share all our work with the teacher and gives us a chance to express our selves in different ways. 



(Blogger logo)

The next main piece  of technology that was used during the research stage was the search engine Google. I used Google so that i could research into existing media products, such as real adverts, digipaks and music videos. It was important that i carried out this research so that i could gain new ideas which would help me conduct my own media products. Once i had carried out my research i then uploaded the selected media products to my blog so that i could combined all the ideas together and analyse them to help me in the planning stage. 

(google logo)

Also, during the research stage i used Youtube. This was became very useful to me as i was able to research about existing music videos. I did this by watching existing music videos from all genres so that i could gain some ideas which would help me produce my own music video. Using Youtube was a great advantage to me as i had access to thousands of existing music videos, which i was able to analyses for new ideas. By having access to this source of technology it made the process of planning for my music video very easy, as without it i wouldn't of been able to come up with some of the ideas that we put into our video.

(Youtube logo)

As we were working in a team for this project, it was extremely important that we had good communication, especially when we were not together. Therefore, we decided to create a Snapchat group chat. Snapchat is a social media app that can be downloaded onto your smart phone, the app allows you to send written messages and photo messages to your friend. We decided to create the group chat so that we could share ideas and tell each other what props and equipment we needed to bring in for filming days. By having access to Snapchat it was very helpful to us, because it kept us organised, and also having good communication in the team is very good.

 (snapchat logo)

To help market out band and media products we set up a twitter account. By having this it allows us to stay in contact with our fans to keep them up dated on regular news, such as tour dates, when new albums are dropping, gain more research and etc. This type of social media is very useful to us because it allows us to engage with fans.

(Twitter logo)

Once all the planning was completed it was time to start taking photos for our album cover adverts and digipaks. For this we wanted to use a camera that took high quality images so that our media products looked as professional as we could make them. As a result of this we decided to use a Panasonic Lumix GH5 camera. This camera was extremly easy to use which was very good for our group as none of us are use to using a camera. By having access to this camera it meant that we were able to get some great shots for our adverts and digipaks.

(photo of camera)

After taking all the photos i important them onto my Apple Imac so that i could selected the good photos and delete the bad ones, ready to start creating my media products. This method was extremely easy as i all needed to do was insert the SD into the back of the Mac and click download. All the images then came up onto my screen and i just needed to put them into specific folders.

(picture of apple mac)

By having all my photos that i wanted to use in folders this then made it very easy for when i started using Adobe Photoshop. This is a graphics editor software that is downloadable for mac and windows. I used Adobe Photoshop throughout the whole process of creating my music album advert and my digipak. This is because i am use to working on this software as i have been working with it for four years now. The software comes with hundreds of tools that make it very fun and easy to use, the layout of the system is very simple which is why i like working with it.

(photoshop image)

To create the final video we used two different software's. First of all we decided to use to Imovie as  this was the default system designed by Apple, so we thought it would work very well, because we thought the link between the two Apple products (the Apple mac and Imovie) would correspond with each other, which was correct; as we found this stysem very easy to use when creating our draft music video. This system was good because it did everything we needed it to do, however, we gained information from other class members that another software, called Final Cut pro was much easier and better to use. As a result of this we decided to use it for our final music video. Final Cut pro was hard to get use to but after researching how to use it we found it much easier to use and it had a lot of effects/ tools to use. We thought it was important that the software that we were using had a lot of effects because this was on of our main ideas for our video.

(imovie & final cut pro image)