Q.4 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation sheet?

Q.4 How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning and evaluation sheet?

During the research planning for our music video we used the internet for sites such as YouTube. I used youtube.com in order to gain a better understanding of the metal genre as it's not the usual genre that I listen to. What I used YouTube for was to look up and view music videos from different bands of the same genre as our song (rock/metal) and this helped me to understand what motifs/themes, cinematography and mise en scene should be in our music video. I looked at the music videos of bands such as Black Veil Brides and Black Stone Cherry in order to make our music video the best it could be.

Advantage: Easy to find videos about metal/rock music/bands.
Disadvantage: Lots of 'fan videos' which are just lyrics on screen or pictures of the band instead of actual music videos.

During research, I used google.com. Google is a search engine which allows you to look up anything and everything you need to. I used Google to look up our chosen band As Gods. I've also used Google to find images for things I've wanted to visualise in my blog entries.


Advantage: Easy to find information on chosen subject.
Disadvantage: Sometimes difficult to find specific bits of information and sometimes hard to copy and save images.

In order to be able view YouTube to research the metal/rock genre, I used an Apple Mac. Apple Macs are extremely good for being creative but for me, the downside was that I'm used to  Windows Pc so it was quite difficult to adjust and to understand how to do certain things. Overall these macs were a good use though so hopefully I can understand how to use them properly!

Advantage: Good for creative purposes e.g. editing and producing our music video.
Disadvantage: Used to a PC so everything twice as long!

Throughout our music video process we've used digital technology to create it. In order to actually make our music video we used a Sony digitial video camera to record our footage. This camera actually records onto an SD card but we didn't have one of them so it recorded onto its hard drive and we had to use a USB cable to link it through to the computer in able to get the footage off so we could edit it.

Advantage: Digital so easy to view footage on camera and no risk of filming over footage.
Disadvantage: USB connection to computer wouldn't work for a while so difficult to get footage onto the computer.

In order to edit our footage, we needed to use an editing programme. The one we used was iMovie which is an Apple programme. iMovie enabled us to move footage where we wanted it to be, it allowed us to cut footage and we even found out that you could change the brightness and contrast of our footage! Without iMovie we wouldn't have been able to do our music video so we're very grateful to it!

Advantage: Brilliant techniques; the way you can do certain things with your video e.g. effects.
Disadvantage: Not that easy to use if using for the first time; not self explanatory.

For our Poster, we used a programme called InDesign which is an Adobe software. In InDesign we created the poster by making it a box and then placing our chosen photograph into that box. We then put writing over the top to actually make it look like a real magazine advertisement. My only criticism of InDesign is that it's not very easy to use unless you know what you're doing because the common tools (text, make a text box) aren't labelled so they're quite hard to find. However, we did all learn new skills whilst using InDesign so it's not all bad.

Advantage: Using InDesign was really professional to use for our CD cover and magazine advert. Was used instead of Photoshop so looked more realistic.
Disadvantage: None of us had used InDesign before so it was difficult to get a lot of the things we wanted done.

Some of our photos were quite dark so we needed to make them lighter and brighter. In order to do this we used Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop we made our photos brighter so more detail could be seen. We also cropped our photos in Photoshop as the photos were too big too big to be a CD so we cropped them down until they were 13 by 13cm. Photoshop was a great help to us because our advert and CD case both have the photos that we wanted because we resized them. If we hadn't have been able to resized them in Photoshop, we would have had to take more photographs so Photoshop saved us a lot of time!

Advantage: We were able to edit our photographs efficiently because both me and Nick had used Photoshop before.
Disadvantage: Tilly didn't really know how to use Photoshop and although she gave lots of input, I think she felt left out and we didn't all function properly as a group.

In order to record all of this, we've had to use blogger.com. Blogger is an online blogging system which allows people to voice their thoughts or write their coursework just like I am. Blogger is relatively easy to use but sometimes the formatting and spacing between images goes off key and it's hard to put them back into place. Other than that though I've had no trouble with Blogger and have overall enjoyed using these things in order to create my my media products.

Advantage: We were able to document and upload our coursework onto Blogger to create this blog you're reading now!
Disadvantage: The layout of writing posts was different in the finished post than it looked whilst writing it. Frustrating to organise the layout.