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

We used a lot of different technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of our music video. For the research part of my groups project I used video hosting sites such as YouTube in order to research different genres of music and what these videos consist of. This website gave me access to millions of songs worldwide so searching for different genres wasn’t difficult. With a flash player, which allowed me to pause, stop and start videos, which was useful for when I was print screening images of the video. In addition to this the website gives related videos which helped me search of other videos from the same artist or genre.

I also used the music player on the MTV website, which has various groups of genres each of which contain chart topping music videos. The advantages of this website is that it gives official music videos that are current. In comparison YouTube was probably the better website to use, it allows us to look on artists’ channels, which allows us to write to the artist and view all posts made specific to that artist for example new videos or messages, it offered a quick search time and gave various results which could be filtered if necessary, furthermore it allows us to look at comments made by everyone about the videos posted which enables us to look at what people think of videos so we can target likes or dislikes that they had, it also shows us how many times its been viewed which is helpful for popularity.

For the research task of digipaks Amazon was useful because it helped me find album artwork of the albums I researched, in addition to this website I also used Google Images, which allowed me to do the same thing and find images that Amazon may not have had, images are usually good quality and of appropriate size which was useful when choosing an image to use. In order to upload all my work in all sections I used both Slideshare and BlogSpot. Slideshare was useful because it allowed me to convert files from word and PowerPoint and use an embed code to upload it onto my blog, conversion of the files were also fairly quick depending on the size of the file. Another use of embed codes was for uploading the song from Soundcloud onto our blogs, this method is quick and so saves time and even money where USB keys /or downloading and then uploading would have had to be used before to transfer a music file from one site to another. BlogSpot simply allowed us to organize and upload our work for review from any computer that has access to the internet, which was useful for group members and myself incase I had to do work outside of school.

Slideshare was extremely helpful in the planning section which consisted of a lot of PowerPoint and word documents, the uploading and conversion of these files onto Slideshare was quick and made it easy to put it onto my blog with the embed code. As well as this a camera phone/digital camera was used for the pictures of our group, good quality pictures can be quickly taken and uploaded onto the computer from anywhere however camera quality on the phone is usually less then that of the HD digital camera, however quick shots can be taken and sent to group members or even uploaded directly to the internet with the use of smart phones, this saves a lot of time

The construction section used a lot of new technologies, primarily Photoshop, for the creation of my digipak and our group’s poster Photoshop CS5 was used, this software enabled me to manipulate and edit images to create a digipak suitable for the artist we are trying to sell, again I used a high quality 12megapixel digital camera to take pictures of the artist and then use them on the digipak when I was creating it. The pictures are high quality and flash can be used which helped in low light situations, the images were easy to upload and the camera itself had a feature which allowed me to screw it onto a tripod for level and steady shooting to minimize shake for a better picture. For the creation of our video we used iMovie HD which let us upload clips and aggregate them to make our music video, this piece of software let us trim, edit and add effects to clips, it’s a fairly intuitive software so

learning to use it wasn’t too difficult in comparison to Final cut Pro and this meant that more members of our group could use it as opposed to relying on one member of the group to do all the editing. Saving and uploading of the music video was also fairly easy, although the file was large because it was in high quality, YouTube was used to upload our music video which was slow because the file was large however eventually did upload, quality was slightly reduced when uploaded to YouTube, but it allowed us to play the video online from any computer which was useful for the evaluation section of my blog because it meant we could all take screenshots of the video from any computer. A portable microphone was used for podcasts, which was easy to use and recorded in good quality. File transfer was easy through the use of a usb cable and files can be cut/trimmed by using the program Audacity. This method saves time an uploading is easy – the mp4 file can be uploaded straight to blogger or can be put on YouTube and then the embed code can be copied. YouTube is again useful in this section as it allows us to comment on videos, these comments come from a wider range of the public and a variety of people. This can be treated as feedback which is unbiased.