Evaluation Question 4; How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used a range of different media technologies during each stage f our media production, being the construction, research and planning and the evaluation stage.

Research and planning stageDuring the research and planning stage of our media production, we used different types of technologies in order to achieve it.
This included the internet as a big one in this stage. We used the internet to search elements of our music video. We did this by researching into indie band/singers music videos in order to get to know the conventions to follow or go against in our own production. This was done by using YouTube. We used this site because it holds all music videos from every music band/singer so this was the ideal site to use to find what we was looking for. We also used this to look at our peoples music videos they have created in A2 Media Studies of the indie genre. We did this to get more ideas and see what we have to do to reach a high level in terms of marks by the examiner.We also looked into websites of indie bands/singers such as Two Door Cinema Club and Kodaline. This helped us to build up an image of what needs to be included on our created website and what are good ideas. This was a good way that we used the internet in order to research into the indie genre in the terms of websites and music videos.



We gathered images of outfit ideas of what we wanted the main character within the music video to wear and shot ideas from other videos by using Google as a search engine. We also used this to find images of the locations we was planning on filming in which helped us create an image of what the music video is going to look like and gave us a plan of action.

We used our emailing system within school in order to ask the band, The Shape Of The Earth, for permission to use their song and create a music video for them. This was done so that we was allowed to use the song for our A2 Media Studies production.




Another media technology that we used is Adobe PowerPoint Presentation. We used this to create our initial group idea. This was chosen to present this because it was clear and easy to use and to show our idea to each other and our media group and teacher before beginning to produce it into a music video.
Prezzi was another media type we used to present many different things in research and planning. Examples of this was research into our each genre of music and our chosen genre, being indie.

During the research and planning stage of our of media production, we created a Facebook page. This was done in order for us to get audience feedback from a social networking site. This was chosen because it is the most popular social networking site and one that holds people of our target audience age and gender.

We had to do some research into digipaks before we created our own for the band The Shape Of The Earth. We did this by using the search engine Google again and was able to use images and other sites that link from that. This helped us to see what indie band/singer digipaks were like and to make sure we included some of the conventions in our own.

Album covers were something else that we used Google to search for. We looked at the albums The Shape Of The Earth already have using their band website. We did this in order to make sure we designed a digipak that would fit in with their image and the is the same type of what they already have. We also researched into other indie band/singer digipaks in order to get more of an idea about the conventions that need to be included to show this clearly to the viewers.

Blogger was something we used in order to track our progress and put every bit of research and planning onto in order to show the examiner. This was used for a personal blog to show the evidence of everything we have done throughout the year in terms of research and planning into creating our music video, website and digipak.

Construction

The camera was the most used part during the construction stage. We used one of our group members cameras instead of the schools due to the quality being better doing it this way. The camera we used was Fujifilm FinePix S2995 Digital Bridge Camera. We also used a tripod during the constructin stage in order to make sure that we could do some steady shots that looked professional and have no bad shots for our music video.



















We used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit and put together our music video. This was what we used for the whole video, in order to import the song, all of our clips and put them together with editing and transitions. This was another one of our main technologies that we used during the construction stage of our A2 Media Studies Production. We experienced some problems with this programme on the schools computer systems and we had to use last minute editing with a new version of Adobe Premiere Pro that was downloaded as a trail for us within school. This helped us with all of the editing we couldn't do with the older version and this meant we was able to complete our music video to the standard of which we wanted it at.

YouTube was used again in the construction stage as well as in the research and planning for audience feedback. We uploaded our rough cut and our final music video production onto the site to see what people thought in order to gain some audience feedback for ourselves and for the feedback for our blogs.

We used the sound booth  in order to record an argument between two people for the start of our music video. We had to arrange a time and date for this to happen in order to use the sound booth. We used two students from our year to play the role of the parents of the main character within our video from drama to act out an argument for us. We was able to piece this together and layer it on top of each other to create the right effect we was going for using a computer programme called Audacity. We was then able to convert this and save it into our school documents as audio to place into Adobe Premiere Pro and put into our music video.























Evaluation

We used Abode Premiere Pro during our evaluation stage in order to create a video and piece it together about our audience feedback. This was done for an evaluation question and included clips of us recording groups of people watching our music video. This also included the song other the top of the images and the audience's comments.

We had to use the school camera in order to film these groups of people watching our music video in order to receive feedback. We had to use this camera as the clips are easier to convert in this way, rather than using our own camera for the audience feedback video.Our phones were another type of technology that we used during the evaluation stage of our media production. We used them to take pictures of the group using the equipment in order to place into this evaluation question. We was also able to film use opening up the digipak and emailing it across using the school emailing system to show it clearly to the audience more. This was done because it is hard to see what the digipak is like through images and thought that the examiner would like to see an explanation of how to open it up to show the idea we are trying to put across through it.

We also used the school emailing system in order to update the rest of the group and our media studies teacher about what is complete and what else we need to do. This was a fast and easy way of communicating with each other outside of lesson.

Blogger was something we used greatly during this stage of the production. This is because we had to look back at posts that we have made throughout the year to see what types of technology we used in creating our production during the stages of our music video. We also post our evaluation questions on our blog for the examiner to see, making it an important type of technology during this stage.