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

Research Stage

Use of PowerPoint I used PowerPoint during my research to display my research. It was

used to show what I was researching into and what I discovered. This included analysing the music video, research into other media forms and other research tasks that needed completing.

I think it was a beneficial technology. It allowed me to quickly and easily complete research tasks, and include images and photos to try and make it more creative. No slide limit allowed me to go into further detail that other technologies may not have been as good at. It isn’t a perfect technology. The major con PowerPoint has is that it doesn’t allow for that much creativity and it can be quite boring to read and look at. Too me this wasn’t a huge problem, it’s more important to get the work done and documented than to make it fun. Ideally both would be perfect, but for what PowerPoint was required for it did the job and it did the job well.

This technology has had a heavy impact on the duration of this coursework. It was used in all four stages of the coursework because of it being simple, easy to use and effective for the tasks that needed to be completed. This is a good and positive impact because of it being used a lot for a good purpose. It allowed me to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. The negative impact would be less creativity, but this isn’t as important as actually getting the work done and this negative side is therefore not huge.

I don’t think I have become more creative as a result of this technology. The technology doesn’t allow for much creativity and therefore I didn’t have any opportunity to become more creative. However, I was still able to get the work done quickly and effectively so this isn’t to major and issue.

Use of Photoshop I used Photoshop during my research to display my research. It was

used to show what I was researching into and what I discovered. This included analysing the “What is a music video?” task, the task for researching into adverts, creating the record label logo and creating certain images for the PowerPoint pages.

This technology had certain benefits. One of these was that it allowed me a more creative way to display my work than other technologies would offer. It allowed me to incorporate images with text in a more effective way as it is image editing software. One flaw to it was that once the image background had been created I was constricted to that image size meaning that if I was at the size limit I couldn’t go over it or add more detail or information. This was bad as it meant my research was not as in-depth as it could have been.

This technology has made a heavy impact on this coursework. It has been used in all four stages of the unit. This is because it allows me to be more creative and display the work in a more artistic and entertaining method. The lack of detail was a problem but this was simple to overcome in future tasks, use it for image tasks or less detailed tasks. This allowed me to overcome the problem allowing Photoshop to be used as an effective and efficient software.

I think I have become more creative because of it. This was the first real creativity used in this task (as most of the research was PowerPoint based) and this gave me the confidence and skills to become more creative in future tasks (with more creative technologies being used in later tasks, especially the planning stage). Whilst Photoshop wasn’t the most common used creative tool, it definitely started the meld into the creativity.

Use of Prezi I used Prezi during my research to display my research. It was used to show what I was

researching into and what I discovered. The tasks it was used for was mostly summary tasks to conclude and summarise overall research. It was also used during my research into record label logos.

This technology has certain benefits. It allows a more creative, fun and interactive slideshow to be shown to the audience which makes my research more creative to use and interesting for the people who would look at my research. However, it has a similar to Photoshop. Each Prezi template has a certain number of slides (and whilst it’s possible to add in more this makes the transitions look weird, confusing and less natural) meaning that only a certain amount of information could be entered meaning that I wasn’t as detailed as I could be with my research. Another con this technology has was that it wasn’t the easiest to use. A lot of buttons and menus had to be clicked just to upload an image, with re-sizing and placement tools not being effective or user friendly.

Prezi did however make an impact, with it being again used in both the planning and evaluation stages. To overcome the detail problem I again used it for tasks that didn’t require much detail or information, so that certain tasks could still be used in a creative or interactive way.

I don’t think I became more creative as a result of Prezi. Whilst it was a creative technology it isn’t fully creative, as it’s pretty much just a PowerPoint with transitions. Adding transitions on PowerPoint was something I could already do and therefore I did not become more creative as a result of this technology.

Use of Publisher I used Prezi during my research to display my research.

It was used to show what I was researching into and what I discovered. The tasks it was used for was research into music videos and for this it was used twice. I used it to make magazine/newsletter articles that acted as research.

This software had two big advantages. It was creative and allowed for a lot of detail. The creativity came through it being an article in something whilst the detail was that there was no page limit. This meant more detailed tasks could be presented in a more creative way. One flaw however was that the software wasn’t user friendly and it took a lot of time to make the in-built templates match what needed to be created and displayed.

Because of this it did not make much impact. It took too much time meaning it wasn’t very efficient or effective to use. It was used in the evaluation only because it matched the requirements of being detailed and creative. If it was less time consuming and more user friendly it would have been used during all stages of this coursework.

Because of it not being used much I didn’t become more creative. It wasn’t used enough to make or influence my creativity. If it was used more then there is the chance it might have influenced my creativity and potentially made me more creative, but it wasn’t used enough to actually be able to tell if I was or was not.

Use of Sony Vegas I used Sony Vegas during my research to display my

research. It was used to show what I was researching into and what I discovered. The tasks it was used for was to research into music videos in a music video format.

This software had many benefits. It allowed for in-depth detailed revision in a creative method. It was also easy to use (I already had experience with this software). Certain cons was that it took a while to render, but this wasn’t much of a problem because during the render time I could complete other tasks with other technologies allowing research to progress further.

The software made a huge impact on my music video production. It was the software I used to edit my music video and also a tool used in the evaluation. This was the key software in this unit because of this. However it was not used during planning because the planning tasks didn’t seem appropriate for this technology.

This did increase my creativity. It allowed for detailed research in a creative way and allowed me to think more about what shots would suit the voice over provided for the voice-over clip which wasn’t always easy making me more creative with the shots provided from the research video on this task.

Use of Audacity Audacity was used to help with the videos that

displayed the research as mentioned in the previous slide. It was used to record the voiceovers for the said videos.

It didn’t really affect the overall research, it was just a sound recording tool I used, with potential filters that were not used. I just recorded and exported. This was however, simple to use and effective and these are benefits to the software.

Because it was only used as a voice over it didn’t make much impact. It was used again during the evaluation for the voice over of those videos and pod cast, but I didn’t use it enough or it’s sophisticated features enough for it to make an impact on the progression and production of this coursework unit. For these same reasons, it didn’t increase my creativity nor did it make me a more creative person.

Use of Online tools Certain online tools were used to further progress this unit. An

online time-line maker was used to make the time-line, whilst services like Slideshare was used to upload the work with Blogger being used to display the work to the audience. Xtranormal was also used as a more creative method to display research.

Using these online tools has certain benefits. It meant the work was lest likely to be lost as it was stored on the cloud and internet (meaning it could be accessed wherever internet access was available). If it was on hard disk the file could be lost or accidentally deleted so this made the files more safe. This did however have a con. If internet access was not available the files weren’t meaning the research completed wouldn’t work, be corrupted or damaged. This would have meant that I had to re-do it all but thankfully this proved not to be a problem.

Online tools made a huge impact on my coursework. Especially Blogger, because without this the work completed on the coursework wouldn’t be displayed and therefore wouldn’t be available to be graded.

Whilst most online tools weren’t used again, I think I did become more creative as a result of them being used. They were creative tools, that therefore allowed me to become more inspired and in turn more creative, and without them the rest of the unit wouldn’t have been as creative (even though there is still room for more creativity).