How did you use media technologies in the construction

and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Jack Wright

In the construction, research, planning and evaluation of my media coursework I used a

number of different media technologies, some new and some that we already had experience on to create my work. This meant that we had

to quickly grasp how to use some new technology but also enhance our knowledge and understanding of others we had already

used to create our media work.

For the research we undertook we took advantage of the internet which is one of the most important technologies created in the modern era, this let us go on websites such as Google and YouTube to find out research for our ancillary projects and also to analyze music video’s via YouTube for the research

task.

YouTube helped at all stages of our production as we could watch other music videos for our research. This helped decided what song we were going to

use and get ideas on what we would include in our music video. It also then gave us the platform to upload our video onto the internet so that other

people could view it and then leave feedback. We found ourselves regularly watching videos looking

for ideas to improve our music video.

For my ancillary pieces of work I used adobe Photoshop, I already had prior experience with this software as we used it for AS work and this made

creating the ancillary quick and easy. Whilst it meant we could add more complicated edits and

therefor create a better ancillary piece.

I found myself regularly switching between different hardware.

At home I had access to Apple.

Where as in college I used Microsoft.

Both systems had many similarities but at the same time also had many differences which lead

to some difficulties transferring the work from apple software to the software Microsoft use.

We used a Nikon D3100 SLR Camera to

record all of our filming

The camera is the most important piece of kit we used throughout our media coursework as it was

fundamental in the construction stages of our work. It was crucial that we got to grips with how to the

camera worked and the many different settings you could use to make our video better than the rest.

Along with the camera we used a tripod. This piece of kit helped us get different types of

shots whilst keeping the camera steady. This made the video look

more professional and worked in turn with the handheld shots we had.

We also used survey monkey which was a new website to me, this site let you create surveys which

you would email to others and the replies would then go into different charts and graphs. It helped

me gain ideas and gage opinions on different videos.

When putting together our video and editing it we used Adobe Premiere Pro.

This software was difficult to get to grips at first as it was new to me but once I knew what to do I could easily edit clips and began to piece together our music video. I believe the use of this software gave our video a professional edge.

We used a website called Prezi which let you create different types of presentations. These were more interesting to view than just the normal Microsoft PowerPoint. The site let you upload pictures and

videos to it. This site helped us make the evaluation and production stages more exciting

Slideshare allowed us to upload Microsoft documents into our blog using the HTML

Without blogger we wouldn’t have had an area to upload all my work and finished items. Blogger lets you upload texts , videos, pictures and documents to the internet. It helped me to stay organised and also track my progress along the way. It also let me split my work into different sections. I believe that

without blogger I would have struggled to stay organised and finish my coursework.

The iPhone played a massive part in creating our media products as I could easily communicate with

my colleague throughout the work via iMessage. This made planning the filming a lot easier and

helped a lot.

Also apps such as Facebook and twitter and YouTube on the iPhone meant we could gain interest via

tweets and status to get people to view the video

Facebook let us showcase our work in a group chat to get feedback on what people thought of the

video, we also used Facebook and twitter to spread the word of the video and this lead to receiving over 80 views within the first couple of hours of posting

The good relationship between YouTube and twitter meant that we could out our video on the site for people to view and also retweet so their friends saw the video as well

We used Mind genius to show our planning stage of the production as it like us make mind maps which we could put all our ideas onto the map and then decide which we liked the most. I liked the mind

maps as it made keeping all the ideas together easy and meant that as I worked with my partner both of

our ideas were together.

Drawbacks

There was however some drawback in the technology we used…

The internet sometime went down due to the amount of people using it and this lead to chunks of

lesson time being lost

We also had error codes come up whilst using Adobe and this even lead to some work being lost. However we learnt the importance of saving our

work and regularly saved it thereafter.

Adobe Premiere Pro also closed down unexpectedly sometimes and this was frustrating as it took time

to restart the system.

The rendering of the video lead to a lot of time being lost as it took over an hour to render and download before we could upload the video to

YouTube and Vimeo. I would of probably used the newer version of Premiere Pro if it had been

available as it would have been quicker and less time would have been lost.

We also had a slight problem with the copyright issues on YouTube as we didn’t own the music for

the clip and at first the music company blocked the video we were however able to sort this out.

Apart from a few issues with the technology it all ran smoothly and worked well