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

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

Throughout the process of creating my texts along with planning and research and even evaluating the project used a huge variety of technology. I will go through each stage separately, from the start of planning and research through to the evaluation, I will identify each technology that I used and explain what I have used them for.

Planning and Research
My planning and research section was extensive and I wanted to thoroughly research each element of a music video for example genre, audience, conventions etc. This was to ensure that my final product would be conventional and would look professional, presenting this research was very important. From the get go I have been using Blogger to present my entire portfolio throughout this process I have learnt many things about Blogger at the start all I used Blogger for was to post simple text however now I am aware how to use Blogger to its full potential and present my work in a nice manner and the making it look consistent and professional. Throughout I have also used USB sticks and cloud storage to store my work, I believe that cloud storage was very important throughout my progress, I used it more often than a USB stick as it was more reliable as it was impossible to loose or forget the work on the day that I need it.  The use of college computers and my own home computer was used to do the large amount of work on, the access to simple software such as Word and PowePoint assisted me in my planning and research.

When looking at conventions of music videos I wanted to display them on my blog and I used the YouTube embed function so they would be displayed efficiently onto my blog, this is very useful as it saved time and blog loading time, if the embed function was not available I would have to use a software such as ClipConverter and download the videos then upload them onto my blog.  I presented my finding about conventions of music videos and my analysis using a few presentation methods for example Prezi, Prezi in my opinion is the best way to present work for my media blog, this is due to its appealing style and ease of use, you can present simple text in a colorful and active environment making it look more appealing then a simple powerpoint. Saying this I still did use powerpoint for things such as theory research, this was due to needed large amounts of information in a basic form, I would use slideshare to present this, this allowed me to embed my powerpoints onto my blog in the same way that YouTube does.

The most of my research was done using Google search, I used this to search for my ancillary text examples as well as music video examples, however if I wanted to find something more academic I used  https://scholar.google.co.uk/ as this filters anything that is not used as an educational source therefore getting me relevant and reliable information fast. This was specifically helpful when looking into theories.


As well as researching existing products I had to plan my own and I used a variety of technology I used Vimeo and YouTube to look at videos to gain inspiration for my own work, I often presented this in Prezi. As well as looking at videos I also looked at sites such as Pinterest and Tumblr, In this I could search specific tags that relate to my music videos and therefore make a moodboard in Photoshop this Photoshop skills I obtained when working on my AS Media work. For my ancillary texts I had to decide on a style and a main aspect of this is the font. I used DaFont to research what fonts I wanted to use and I compared them as part of my planning process this helped me set my style of my magazine advert and my digipak. When looking at colour I used Adobe Colour, this allowed me to select a specific colour and it would pick colours that are similar or suit the colour I have picked therefore making choosing a colour scheme very easy.  

Audience research was a huge aspect of my planning and research as mentioned in my previous evaluation question. I used a method of research that can be distributed easily over social media and through emails.  I used sites like Smart Survey and Surveymonkey to create questionnaires examples of my surveys can be seen on my blog.

Construction of my Products 
I used media technologies throughout the construction of my media products, for my music video I used 2 simple pieces of equipment a Canon 1000D camera and a simple tripod, I stored all my footage on a 8GB SD card and the transfered all my footage into a folder on my home computer to ensure that it was all stored in one place. When filming I didn't use any extra lighting as I wanted it to be natural, along with this it would be heavy and expensive to transport good lighting to my shooting locations.
For editing I used Sony Vegas Pro 13 and Adobe After Effects, the two software I used allows me to experiment and do different things with my footage, within Vegas I simple added my footage together in order and edited with fades and cuts, along with this I edited the clips to the beat to make my video conventional, within Vegas I also added colour contrast as you can see within a previous post. Within Adobe AE I made my star effect and my moon effects these was made through research that I did on the Internet to enable me to achieve this look.
For the construction of my ancillary texts I used Photoshop and the templates that was provided on the student resources, to take the photos for my ancillary texts I used the same Canon camera as I did for filming.