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

Kelsi Varney

YouTube

YouTube was the site I used for my research into existing media. This enabled me to search for any music video I wanted to analyse, and embed it onto my blog so that I could put the video and my analysis of the video together.

Research

Google images

Before planning my ancillary texts, I researched existing digipacks and music posters. I used Google images for this as I knew that it would have images of any poster or digipack I searched for. It also enabled me to copy the images and paste them onto my blog with my analysis’ next to them.

Research

Soundcloud / Bandcamp

One of the specifications for our music video was that the song had to be from an unsigned artist. Soundcloud and Bandcamp are both online audio distribution platforms used by unsigned artists to share their music tracks so these were the first sites we went on after deciding as a group what genre we wanted our song to be. These sites allow you to select a genre and then browse only the songs that are of interest to you. However, after browsing through the Indie/Rock genre for some time, I suggested we use my friends band, Over The House, as they had a Bandcamp account which allowed us to listen to their songs and upload them to blogger easily via Bandcamp.

Research

Twitter

Another reason for choosing Over The House was that because I knew them I could easily ask for their permission by sending a direct message via the social networking site Twitter, this also meant we received a quick response, allowing us to begin planning very quickly.

Research

Prezi

As I ended up doing more research for A2 than I had done for AS I found I needed some new methods of presenting my work. Prezi is a cloud based presentation software which allows you to zoom in and out of the presentation media, I had never used anything like Prezi before, however it was relatively easy to get the hang of.

Research

Cameras

The cameras this year were new ones so we had no previous experience with them. However, we found that this was a positive change as these new cameras picked up lighting better so proved more useful when taking test shots in the theatre. However, when filming the dancers in the theatre the cameras kept going in and out of focus, and as we had no experience with this technology, we weren’t sure of how to remedy this. In the end we just made sure to avoid using any out of focus shots when putting out video together.

Planning

Final Cut

One of the most significant changes in technologies used from AS to A2 was the move from IMovie to Final Cut. Before production we familiarised ourselves with this programme and learnt of its new features and how they might be of use to us in the post production stage.

Planning

Corel Draw

We planned and eventually constructed our digipack on Corel Draw, which is an advanced editing programme. The main reason for using this is that I had experience creating digipacks on Corel Draw before so I could just get straight on with planning out designs, without having to learn all of it’s features first.

Planning

Go animate

Having never used go animate before, it took a short while to get the hang of it, but it was worth it because it is a unique yet clear way of presenting information and ideas. Which was useful to us as we needed to make sure that all of our evaluation questions were answered differently.

Evaluation