Evaluation Question 4 for my A2 Media Coursework

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

2. Research and Planning

3. Blogger
• We mainly used blogger as a place to display all of the
research and planning. Blogger allows upload of
pictures and the embedding of different types of
multimedia sources. Blogger also allowed us to edit the
posts, so if ideas have changed or developed we can
edit the post to show the developments. Blogger also is
very accessible so we can compare our work to those of
another year and see what we need to add or improve.

4. Slideshare
• I used Slideshare to display word documents on
blogger. Slideshare gives us the ability to work offline
in Word or PowerPoint and use the massive amount of
features in those two programs and then display the
documents on our blog via embedding. Slideshare was
most useful for shooting schedules, risk assessments
and shot lists.

5. Prezi
• Prezi was the main web application we used. It allows
the creation of massive PowerPoint-like slideshows.
Prezi allows importation of photos, YouTube videos,
powerpoints and music. The finished Prezi can then be
embedded on the Blogger by ease. I used Prezi as the
backbone of the coursework, all the intense and large
pieces of the coursework such as Music video, digipak
and album cover conventions.

6. Word and Pages
• I used Microsoft Word and Pages for the shooting
schedule, risk assessment and shot list. It allowed me to
display the information in organised tables. The
finished Word documents can be uploaded to
slideshare to be embedded on Blogger. This really help
use keep the key information organised so I could
make sense of it when I filmed

7. Google
• Google was our main place for research. We used it to
find examples of digipaks and Magazine adverts. We
also used it to find other students blogs and their music
videos during our Student analysis presentation. It was
very helpful in the long run because of the large
amount of content available for use you learn from and
gain ideas.

8. YouTube
• YouTube was an excellent resource in finding student
music videos and popular videos. We analysed videos
we found on YouTube which was from our genre to
find out the popular conventions be follow and apply
them to ours. They videos could be embedded into our
blogs to use as examples or to back up finding in my
work. YouTube’s easy to navigate interface and ability
to embedded and saver videos for later made it a
valuable resource in researching

9. Bauer Media
• Bauer Media was a website that wasn't used a lot because
it is very specific toward informing you about different
media brands. However, it was use a lot in the target
audience research. Its simple presentation of information
allow a clear understanding of the audience that each
brand serves and gave us relevant information on the sort
of media brand that could aid us in our audience appeal

10. UK Tribes
• UK Tribes was a very helpful and informative website
that gave information regarding youth trends and also
some of the issues relevant now. This allowed me to gain
an insight into how music affects the youth of today and
also allowed us to correct some of our target audience
mistakes by looking at some of their youth research.

11. Construction

12. Sony Movie Studio
• The main work-horse in the coursework was
Sony Movie Studio. It was the place where the
music video was edited and rendered. Sony has
a lot of feature bundled with the Movie Studio
package. Some of these feature really helped
bring our music video to life. One of the effects
we used a lot was to speed up the movie clip,
this allowed us to present a large section of
time in reality in a small amount of time. Movie
Studio is very versatile, it allows the
importation of many file types and supports 5-
channel surround sound input. Overall Movie
studio made the editing task very easy with lots
of features and function very centred to the
main timeline. One downfall for Movie Studio
was the complicated rendering options which
really hindered a lot of members of my class.

13. Effects• We mainly used fades in our music video to
transition between our video clips. Effects
were not used heavily on the video to make
it look natural. Some effect we did use a
radial blur effects on some pieces of footage
to make it a bit more interesting. The
opacity was tweaked so allow overlay of 2
different clips. Black and white filters where
also used to indicate memory. This effect os
a common stereotypical representation of a
past memory or event.

14. Outcome of effects
• The overlay of some performance and
narrative parts showed the connection
between these two parts and shows the
audience that the band is just as
important as the narrative.
• The black and white effect was used to
re-enforce the use of drugs by the ‘bad
guy’. The highlighting of the use of drugs
is stereotypical prop used in the genre of
rock because of its rebellious portray.

15. Sony Sound Forge
• This piece of software was not used that
much in the construction of the music
video. However it did come in handy when
we found that the audio track for the song
was very quiet. Sound Forge allowed the
boosting of volume in the tract without
resulting distortion. This helped keep the
song as loud as possible with sound bad.

16. Panasonic HC-X920
Camcorder
• The main piece of technology that could make or break the music
video was the Camcorder. The one I was given was one of the
newer ones that the Media department had. It allowed us to record
in a compressed 1080p resolution which offer crisp detail which
would aid our music video in appeal. It was easy to set up and
transport however, the battery life was a bit of an issue.

17. Smart-phone's
• The ease of taking photos with smart-phone's made producing
editing and filming updates very easy and not very time-
consuming. Once they photos had been taken they could easily be
emailed or physically transferred to blogger to record our work.

18. Photoshop
• During the ancillary task, Photoshop was used heavily to
construct the album cover and the magazine advert. The large
variety of features available made editing the raw images and
positioning them very easy. We had a lot of effect to play and
experiment with. Some of the effects we found were pointless but
some we though would compliment the images nicely.

19. Effects
• The main effects used was shadows, this helped to
make the album look grungy. The ease of use of
Photoshop and layout of the icons made accessing
the features easy. The contour effect made the
image look sharp. The ability to layer photos also
allowed use to use multiple photos and stitch them
together with easy

20. Outcome of effects
• The Black glow effect around the photo
made the digipak cover look grungy, this is
stereotypical of the genre. We tried to
continue this theme through out the digipak.
This fits with in the with bleary eyed
appearance of the protagonist in the video.
• The contour effect on the hand gives the
picture a sharp look. This allows the photo
to look professional done. The uses of stock
image of glass connotes the messy, grubby
overtones present to the audience through
the music

21. Evaluation

22. PowerPoint
• PowerPoint was very helpful for the evaluation
questions. I found that its easy of use and ability to
organise different bits of information into different
slides very helpful in making the information clearly
laid out. The finished PowerPoint could then be
uploaded to slideshare and then embedded onto blogger
which is a good way to display the finished piece of
work

23. Prezi
• Due to the massive amounts of information that is
needed on some of the evaluation question, Prezi was
once again a very reliable and feature rich source, it has
a nearly limitless size to one presentation so it can hold
massive amounts of text, images and videos and can be
organised by assigning each textbox or picture with a
path, which helps overall navigation through the
presentation.

24. Snipping Tool/Screenshot
• The snipping tool is a key tool in the coursework, it
allows a quick and easy way to copy large amounts of
text and photos to put on presentations, word
documents or blog posts. They came in handy when I
had to document the editing process as evidenced for
blogger. Without this tool, screenshot-ing would be a
long time-consuming process.

25. Conclusion
• Overall, this technology I have described above has
really been helpful throughout the coursework. It has
allowed easy reproduction of screenshots, an area with
lots of functions to edit our video and a place to easily
store blog posts. I think that the editing suit that was
used was one of the most important pieces of
technology that was used. It was a program that I spent
hours using and due to its user-friendly appearance and
organised GUI, it made that time really enjoyable.