Danny Laws

A2 Media Studies

4. How did you use new media technologies

in the construction and research, planning

and evaluation stages

THE EVALUATION..

During the course of this project, we’ve had some

enjoyable and some really stressful moments when

using different technologies to make our music video.

We have maintained our knowledge of some

technologies that we used at AS such as being able to

use Photoshop effectively, by editing and cropping

images that would later be used on our Digipak and

magazine adverts.

And we also have expanded our knowledge of some

that we used for the first time in A2 such as Final Cut

Pro which we have developed a lot on as this was

vital to making and producing our music video.

INTRODUCTION

During the course of this project, We have used many different programs, however the two main and most important programs we used was Photoshop and Final Cut Pro x

Photoshop: We used this software to make our digipak and magazine advert, we used tools such as magic wand to cut around images to take away the background so we could then use the image, another tools is eraser tool that made the image have a smooth edge so the image fits in with the new background.

Final Cut Pro x: Final Cut Pro x was a important software to use for us, this is because without this we couldn’t cut, edit produce the music video that we got, we could use the timeline on this software which allowed us to put our recording as well as the song on the same software at the same time, this allowed us to lip sync and make edits to the beat of the song. Final Cut Pro x also allowed us to be able to take shots in front of the green screen because then we could edit the green scene in final cut pro. This software made it really easy for us to upload HD footage easily onto it so that made life easier for us, also being able to add transions and put it effectively in our video was really easy to do. We used this by exploring different ways so just trying different things out to see what they could do and if it looked good or not, we also looked onto YouTube to see tutorials and last we had a Final Cut Pro help booklet.

Programs

Cannon Powershot SX40 HS- This camera at first was hard to use, but after trying things out we learnt that we could do many things on this camera, the lens was good to use as it was different to other camera that I've used before as when you zoomed it, the shot still kept its focus which able use to get good quality of footage, another thing that this camera was good at was being able to use a flash light which at times was useful for us as the lighting become a bit more brighter.

Tripod- This helped us to keep the camera completely still so we could film perfect shots. The tripod was used also allowed us to adjust the height so we could get a wide range of perfect shots from different positions.

Apple Mac- The Apple Mac was different to what I’ve used before but after trying things out I learned that without this it would have been very difficult to do my project, this was because it featured a lot of programs such as final cut pro and after effects this able to use programs that other computers don’t have. We felt that the Mac was better for digital and images because the Mac has better quality of picture so we could get a good insight of what the image looked like, also the Mac has better programs to deal with digitals and images.

Hardware Used For Production

The websites that we used to gain feedback was Facebook and YouTube as these two are leading social

network sites that we could gain a lot of feedback from as there are many friends as well people from our target

audience on these sites, they were easy to upload footage and images on as well used this before.

Also we used these programmes as part of our research and planning we done this by using these to get a

wide range of people from these social networks sites to give their feedback, as well had to see people opinion

on genres and types of music videos so we carried out a questionnaire so the best way to do this we felt was to

put it on Facebook.

Slideshare was again a key websites for us because we had to use this website to convert our PowerPoint

presentation to a format so then we can put it onto our blogs.

Blogger was a website where we had to show all our evidence of developing our skills and products during the

course of the product, this is where we showed our evidence of our research and planning. The reason why we

used blogger was because its firstly a worldwide blogger that has key features like being able to organises our

posts in the order that we wanted to put them in, also it was easy to use which made life easier.

The advantages that this has is that we could do things that maybe we couldn’t do on other blogs for example

change the graphics to the theme that we wanted to have to make it look more professional to match our music

video theme. Furthermore blogger has a comment feature where we could have fellow work mates and our

teacher to make comments on each post, this was very helpful as we could gather feedback on all what we

posting, it was easy to see and read as it will be directly below the post that they was commenting on.

Prezi is another website that we had to use, this website was used to for our evaluation, it gave a new look on

presentations, this was good to use because it was firstly different to what I ever used before so this made my

skills even more better, also the reason why we did use this as we could do many things on the website, like

make the writing pop up when we wanted to but it still looked organisated and fit in well, also we could add

images to sum up what we was talking about.

The tag tool on YouTube was again used for our evaluation, this was good because we had to use it to show

our feedback on our music video, so we could add tags to certain parts of the music video that we was talking

about so the audience that was watching knew what was talking about and could see examples so this made

Websites Used For Feedback

All of the media technologies that I have mentioned played a vital role in helping

me and the group to construct our research and planning as it has allowed us

to use high quality sotware and website to keep on top of the work as they had

features that we never used before so this allowed us to make quality pieces of

work without taking so much time so this kept us organisated , also it allowed us

to make visual planning which was very helpful as we had a better idea on what

we wanted to do. As well as different stages as without them in my opinion this

project wouldn’t be successful at all, the reason for this being that the software

and the hardware are all high quality in their own way so by using high quality

technologies as well as personal skills this would contribute to a high quality

music video, digipak and magazine advert.

I also felt this has made our personal skills better and made our ideas and

better as we had more options to pick from and better effects for our video for

an example, so by having more options and more ideas to choose from we had

a much better video than we maybe would have had in ‘AS Media’ as we had

better media technologies.

How did this all help us?