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

Throughout the course of making my tasks of a music video, album cover and magazine advert i have used many media technologies which have helped me through the processes to finish. In the following paragraphs i will outline when and why i decided to use each technology.


Research:

You tube: This program allowed us to view many different music video to help us to know what was already on offer, from this we were then able to decide whether or not to use, develop, or challenge the stereotypes in these videos. When doing this i updated some posts about our findings, you will find these under the research and planning label on my blog.

Television Channels: This was a great aid as you could see what you thought when they appeared it no particular order you could see what characteristics stood out to you and therefore you would gain an understanding about which stereotypes or characteristics you would want to use and which ones to steer clear from.

The Internet: This was a great way to find out extra information about artists and background information about them. It also helped me to find theorists and their theories about the findings i had made, therefore i was able to link the two and gain theories to support my ideas.


Overall Evaluation: You tube was good as you could find exactly what you wanted to find, although with television channels you were more able to point out different characteristics that stood out because you did not know what was going to come next, although the song that came on after may not relate to your genre and therefore may be time consuming.

The Internet is a fast way to find out exactly what you want to know in just a few clicks i was able to find out a lot i didn't know about R'n'B artists.
I found the blog a great way to keep track of my ideas, i was able to blog my ideas as soon as i either thought of them, or found them and therefore i could research into them further adding more and more detail throughout the course, enabling me to gain a lot more research than i did in AS as we were limited to our scrapbook.


Planning:

I-movie: This program helped us a lot in our planning stages as when building our storyboards, me and my team were able to see what effects and editing techniques were available to us and therefore we were able to create our storyboards, knowing that we would not come across many problems as we had already checked that we were able to do it.

Pictures: Me and my team went out and took location shots to ensure that we were going to create the exact effects that we wanted. We came across some problems in doing this and therefore were able to sort them out before we had filmed, therefore we did not waste much time.

Internet: We again used the Internet in our planning stages as we had many ideas individually and therefore used a program called Facebook to share them, as this gave us all an opportunity to say what ideas we had and then as a group we were able to come to a decision on each one, sometimes we made compromises whereas others we were able to develop certain ideas.

Overall Evaluation: By using these media technologies for planning we saved ourselves a lot of time as we did not come across as many problems as we would have done without the aid of these programmes.


Construction:

Video camera: Although we had used these before in AS, it had been a while since we had used them, therefore we had a practise go first to make sure we didn't make any mistakes. We filmed parts several times to make sure we got the right outlook on it and therefore we didn't have to go back and film certain parts otherwise slight differences would have been noticeable. When uploading and beginning to edit we realised we had to go back and film a bit again here we had to use a certain type of lighting to make the weather look the same otherwise the storyline would not look continuous.

Editing: We used a more modern version of i-movie this year to edit our music videos. This gave us more opportunities as more effects and techniques were available to us.


Hard drive: Whilst editing our music video we backed up our work onto a hard drive therefore if anything did go wrong then we would have a second copy. This hard drive came in handy when going to the CLC building as we were able to take our work with us and connect it to their computer, which had even more techniques for us to use.