1. Q4 -How did you use new media
technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation
stages?
Anand Subramaniam

2. Blogger
Blogger is a blog publishing service that
offers users to make blog posts. I used
this service to upload all my work. I
uploaded work like music video
analyses, drafts for ancillary texts, diary
entries related to file shoots and others.
It was quick, efficient and easy to use. I
have used Blogger during all stages of
the advanced production. I have heavily
used Blogger for research and
planning.

4. Scribd
Scribd is a document sharing service
that allows users to upload
documents, in a variety of formats, for
use of storing and sharing the
documents. I used Scribd to upload pdf
and word documents such as the
storyboard.

6. Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Photoshop CS5 is an image
manipulating software that allows us to
edit images and adding effects to them. I
heavily relied on this software for the
production of the ancillary texts (the CD
digipak and the magazine advertisement).
I decided to choose this package over
others (such as Corel Paintshop Pro and
GIMP) but I have used this package in the
past in a lot of my work, like my AS Media
Studies practical production.

8. Camtasia Studio 7
Camtasia Studio 7 is a video
capturing program that I had used
to record my computer screen. This
software assisted me in creating
parts of the practical production -
during the making of the CCTV
effect for the music video.

11. Divshare
Divshare is a website that offers
users to upload documents and
files of different formats.
However I had used this service
to upload a copy of the track on
which we built our media
products on – the song ‘Tell Me
You’re Sorry’ by Sandhya
Acharya. In turn we had access
to the music track whenever we
needed it.

13. Adobe Audition 3
Adobe Audition 3 is a professional
audio editing program that allows
users to edit music and audio files,
offering the ability to manipulate
these sounds. I used this software to
edit my the audio interview that I did
for one of my evaluation questions. I
had already used this before so it was
easy to get used to it. I could have
used other programs like Audacity but
I felt that Audacity would not provide
me with the flexibility I needed to edit
my audio files.

15. Free Studio Manager
Free Studio Manager is a freeware
suite of multimedia tools. One of the
tools helped me to convert the audio
interview I conducted for the
evaluation. It converted .amr format
to a format that was more useable for
Adobe Audition, the WAV format
(.wav).

17. Smilebox
Smilebox is a program that allowed
users to create many presentational
shows like slideshows. I used this to
present all the photographs we had
taken. Pictures were taken for the
scene where our actress had to burn
pictures in the music video, the stop
motion effect that we used in our
music video, memory pictures in our
music video and for work on our
ancillary texts.

18. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
Adobe Premiere Pro is a professional video
editing tool used by professional video
editors. We primarily used this software to
create our music video. It was fairly easy
to use as I had used this software before.
However challenges that we faced
included creating the split screen effect for
our video. After playing around with the
Effects control, we figured out that the
‘crop’ effect would help us achieve the
split screen. We also leaned frame-by-
frame editing here as well as syncing video
with audio to accomplish the lip-syncing
convention that we intended to use. I also
used this software for up scaling the music
video from standard definition to HD
(720P).

21. Adobe After Effects CS5
Adobe After Effects is post-production
editing software that allows the user to
add visual effects to their video. We
used this software to create the CCTV
effect as well as the moving/picture
effect. Skills that we used were
masking, frame-by-frame editing and
motion tracking. Although I have had
experience with frame-by-frame editing
and motion tracking before, masking
was a new concept to me. However it
did not take long to work out how to
use it and in no time at all, we had used
masking efficiently with the moving
picture effect.

25. Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service.
One of the uses that we had for this
service was when we were looking for
locations. Finding the right interior
locations was harder as one of the
locations we needed was a fireplace.
These days with everyone using electric
and gas heaters, there were very few
people with actual fireplaces. So we
decided to use Facebook to find
someone with a fireplace for our music
video. Social networks are great tools
for advertising help as the amount of
help received is only limited to the
number of people that view your post.

27. Twitter
Twitter is a social networking service.
We used this service for the same
purpose of Facebook: to find the
fireplace that we needed for our music
video. Social networks are great tools
for advertising help as the amount of
help received is only limited to the
number of people that view your tweet.

30. Blackberry Messenger
Blackberry Messenger is a messaging
service that is used by Blackberry
owners to communicate with other
Blackberry owners. Similar to Twitter
and Facebook, we used BBM for
location finding. Social networks are
great tools for advertising help as the
amount of help received is only limited
to the number of people that view your
personal or broadcasted message.

32. YouTube
YouTube is video streaming service that
allows users to view videos and to
upload their own. This service was
mainly used during the research and
planning stages of this project, as it was
used heavily to research into other
music videos. Another use we had for it
was the uploading of our music video
and other videos (such as the ancillary
text construction). YouTube had also
influenced the way music videos were
seen and advertised. It also gave us
with an insight with the way audiences
worked.

34. Slideshare
Slideshare is a document uploading
service that allows users to upload
documents of a variety of formats. I
mainly used this service to upload all
the slideshows that we had created. I
had already used Slideshare so it was
quite easy to use. I used Slideshare to
upload work like the lyrics of the
song, the analysis of the questionnaire
results and the evaluation.

36. Sony DVD Camcorder
We had a choice of using a DV camera
but we went for the Sony Handycam
DCR-DVD105E mini DVD camcorder. We
chose DVD over DV because of better
quality and smaller file sizes. Footage
conversion time was also taken into
consideration. With mini DVD
camcorders it does not take much time
to convert. However with DV, the whole
tape has to be played in order to
convert it. Another problem that we
could have faced with DV was ‘dropout’
where bits of information fail to be
read. This can result in a loss of footage.

37. Canon DSLR Camera
These digital single-lens reflex cameras
were very useful as they helped us to
form our ancillary texts and the stop
motion part of our music video. DSLR
cameras helped us to develop our skills
as photographers by using a wide range
of camera angles. The high quality of
the pictures generated allowed us to
work with images more carefully as
there were more pixels to edit. These
cameras were also good with capturing
light so minimal lighting could easily get
us the effect we were looking for.

38. Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD
Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD is a piece
of software that allowed the editing of
video. However we used it for a
different purpose. As said before, we
had trouble with converting the raw
footage that we had to a editable
format. Sony Vegas has been a useful
tool to help us to convert our footage
into fragments. It allowed the importing
of raw footage straight from the mini
DVD disc and maintained the quality of
the footage.

41. Serif MoviePlus X3
Serif MoviePlus is a video editing tool
used by both professional and amateur
video editors. I used this piece of
software to edit my VoxPox video.
Although I have never used this
software, it was fairly simple to get the
hang of as the interface was user-
friendly. One of the skills that I had
learnt was sound levelling. Due to
changing in the volume of the music I
had to use sound levelling to balance
the audio of the interviewees and the
music.

42. Nero Platinum 11
Nero Platinum is a suite of multimedia
tools. However we had only one use for
it. When we had encoded our footage
we found that one of our clips had a
‘red frame’ glitch in it, where the
sequence would continue to play until a
certain frame in the footage would
replaced by a red screen. We figured
out that Vegas Movie Studio was
generating the glitch no matter how
many times we converted the raw
footage. Nero Video helped us to
decode the footage in a way which
would get rid of the glitch.

43. WhatsApp Messenger
WhatsApp Messenger is a smartphone
messaging application with is available
on the Google Play store, Blackberry
App World and the Apple App Store. We
used this software as a main method of
communication. We benefited from it
as it was free and allowed to send us
unlimited amount of messages. It
helped us to organise meetings, photo
shoots, film shoots, plan days and hold
discussions about issues that we were
facing.

45. Smartphone
The smartphone that I used was the
HTC Desire S. It was used as a
communications tool, with the
members of my group and with social
networking sites. It also featured in the
music video (to help us implement our
idea of product placement). We
decided that it would also attract the
audience as most young people own
smart phones these days. In addition I
also used the voice recording
application on it to help me conduct
one of my evaluation questions.

46. Windows Live Messenger
Windows Live Messenger is an instant
messaging service that allows users to
communicate with other people. I used
this program to help me to conduct one
of my evaluation questions. It was used
as a source of audience feedback and I
thought it was a good idea to use
screen capturing software (Camtasia) to
record the conversation with the
interviewee.

47. Internet (Firefox/Google)
The internet has been one of the most
useful tools. It was particularly helpful
during the research and planning stages
as it was used to find/collect
information. The internet has been a
useful resource for information in
general and has allowed us to look at
music videos for ideas, research into
current media products and artists. I
used Mozilla Firefox as my browser and
Google was the search engine that I
used.