Evaluation: Question Four, Shafaah

How did you use Media Technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Whilst making our project Jenna and I used many different technologies and equipment. When we were planning and doing our research we tended to use computer based technologies such as Google and YouTube. We also used PowerPoint in order to present our findings. Whilst constructing our music video and ancillary texts we used other technologies such as Final Cut Pro, InDesign and Photoshop.

Research and Planning

In order to make sure that our research was good Jenna and I decided that Google would be the best search engine since it was simple to use and very reliable. We used Google to find out the conventions of music videos and to research other music videos to see what the gap in the market was. Had it not been for Google we would have found it very difficult to find things out so quickly. Also it would have made accessing all the music videos we wanted ten times harder.

We chose to use Youtube to find music videos since it is a site which stores music videos made by the different artists of the world. The work of other students was also up our college’s YouTube channel; this made it easy for me to see what past students had done. It also allowed me to fully grasp exactly what the examiner wanted from my work.

Whilst researching Jenna and I wanted all our finding to be posted on our blog. Although blog posts were the most conventional way of producing our research we also chose to use PowerPoint and Microsoft Word since they made it extremely easy for us to publish our findings as well as distribute our questionnaires.

In order for us to post our Power Points on our blog we had to use Slideshare to first convert our presentations. Slideshare is very simple to use, I think I found it extremely easy since I used it a lot last year in my As coursework. As well as converting presentations so that they can be uploaded to the web Slideshare also stores your work for you so that you can access it again without having the hard copy.

Before starting college I had never used an iMac before. At first I found it very difficult and frustrating but now I think they are very simple to use. I have noticed that on iMac’s all my work seems clear. Not just that but it made accessing websites and uploading videos to YouTube very easy since they are very quick. As well as these aspects iMac also had Final Cut Pro which was the main technology we used when editing our music video and director’s commentary.

Blogger is a free blogging site that our media teacher encouraged us to use so that we could post all our work. Blogger claims to be simple and easy to work, I found it extremely irritating since it doesn’t have a tutorial to help you set up your blog. So that once you’ve set up your own blog you have no idea what the next step is.

Construction

To film our music video Jenna and I chose to use a HD camera. I found it very simple to use once I had been given the quick tutorial. The camera itself allowed me to capture clear images and sounds and well as make our music video appear much more professional. Because it was a HD camera the clear shots emphasised the lighting and made green screening a lot easier. Had we filmed in a regular camera the chroma key application would not have worked so well.

Jenna and I chose to film the entirety of our music video in the studio. Because of this choice we were given full access to the green screen and lighting. Whilst filming we had to make sure that both the green screen and our subject were well lit, thank fully we had full use of the studio lighting. If we had to use regular lighting our music video would look terrible due to the bad quality and unwanted shadows. Not only that it, would have made chroma keying much harder since the green screen would have not been lit properly. In order to use the studio Jenna and I had to book it in advance. Sometimes we did not get the time slot we wanted since the studio was in high demand. But luckily we managed to work around that and successfully film our music video.

Initially Jenna and I wanted to use an SLR camera to take the pictures for our ancillary texts. We were convinced to use a standard digital camera though. At first we were rather sceptical, but when we looked over our images we were very pleased with the outcome. We never thought a standard digital camera would be able to produce such high quality images.

Computer Technologies

Whilst constructing our print work applications such as Photoshop and InDesign played vital parts. Although I found them very frustrating and difficult to use, Jenna helped me get my head around them and I was soon able to do simple tasks such as evening out the artist’s skin tone and altering the colour of her clothing and backdrops.

Final Cut Pro was the software that we used to edit our music video and directors commentary. With this programme you are able to drag your footage and soundtrack on to a timeline and make all the changes you want whether that be cut out unwanted shots or layer different ones on top of each other to create a number of effects. Although in last year’s coursework I was given the task of director and screenwriter I found it very easy to use Final Cut Pro. However as much as I like editing on this programme it did get very tedious and extremely annoying since the rendering of videos took a considerable amount of time and it did have a tendency to crash. But in the long run given the chance I would happily work with Final Cut Pro again.