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

Research and Planning

I think this stage of my coursework was where I made the most use of Web 2.0. In terms of finding inspiration for the music video task, the social networking and video streaming site 'Youtube' proved to be the most effective for material. It featured official band websites, which included music videos for the band. It also contained fan-made videos for Fren

ch film, which proved incredibly useful as it was a quick and easy forum to access particular scenes and clips out of the films. Due to the fact that the internet is global, I was able to access media from all over the world, thus giving me better research resources. I was able to search for bands who belong to the same genre of Two Door Cinema Club (the band who I created a marketing package for), and learn about genre conventions. David Buckingham argues that "genre is not simply given by the culture, rather, it is in a constant process of negotiation and change". This definitely proved to be true - through the use of Youtube, I was able to learn about and understand 'indie' genre conventions, gather ideas of my own and then

develop them into something original.

Another interactive website I have made great use out throughout the entirety of my A Level course has been blogger.com. This has allowed me to present my research and planning effectively, and embed HTML codes, allowing me to feature videos from websites such as youtube and slid

eshows from websites such as slideshare.net. This is another example of web 2.0, as the website has allowed me to both consume media and then create media for other internet users.

For the planning stages, I made use of Windows Movie Maker to create an animatic story board. I drew the pictures out on paper, used a scanner to get the pictures onto the computer, and then organised them in windows movie maker to create a storyboard which responded to the music that would later be used on our music video. This proved particularly useful later on in production stages, as I could refer back to the animatic story board I had previously made to make it easier to organize video clips.

When organizing cast meetings, video shoots and audience feedback focal groups, my 'Blackberry Smartphone' became very useful as it was a quick way to contact the necessary people required for the different aspects of my media coursework. Without new communications technology, it would have been a lot more difficult to arrange video shoots, thus making our music video a lot less successful.

Production

For my print production tasks especially, my Canon EOS 450d was an incredibly important and useful piece of Media technology. It allowed me to take professional looking photographs, as opposed to taking photographs on a mobile phone or a digital camera. I could experiment with ISO levels, so I could achieve an ideal white balance for my photographs, which in conjunction with studio lighting allowed me to take a successful photograph. The auto-focus setting made it easy to get a clear and focused picture. The 18 - 55 mm lens allowed me to take a variety of shots, from close up to long shot. In my opinion, this was one of the most vital pieces of technology for my print production coursework, because it allowed me to take a variety of high mega-pixel shots, which were then easy to edit in Adobe Photoshop, which in conjunction with each other helped me create a successful print production pack.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 was really useful for both my print production task and my music video. I designed the entirety of my print production task on Photoshop, and was the ideal media device for doing the job. I made use of brightness and contrast filters, to make a more distinctive monochrome image. The layers feature and the magic wand tool allowed me to edit the image so I kept the distinctive red braces on my photographs, which looked affective with the black and white image. The clonestamp tool allowed me to alter any make-up mistakes, and the burn tool allowed me to make darker aspects of the photograph more distinctive. The clonestamp tool was also incredibly useful when merging images together, which was a key aspect of my digipak design. It made it easy to arrange text on the pictures, and chose an appropriate point size and colour for the design. Using professional media technology such as Adobe Photoshop allowed us to replicate something that would be produced in the media industry.

We also used Adobe Photoshop for aspects of the music video task. We wanted to create a vignette to differentiate between the flashback clips and the clips in the 'present'. Do do this we filled the page using the radial gradient tool and then applied a gaussian blur filter to make the vignette more subtle. We then saved it as a PSD file and imported it onto our music video. Without the use of Adobe Photoshop we wouldn't have been able to create a distinctive differentiate our flashbacks, thus making the narrative in our video less clear and understandable for the target audience. Also for our music video task, we experimented with the RGB Curves filters on Photoshop to find out which settings looked the most successful on a photograph. After doing this, we applied the same settings to our music video, and were able to put a colour filter that we were happy with onto our music video. This was essential as we wanted our video to have an 'unpolished vintage' look, and without the colour filters it would have looked more modern due to the high quality image produced by the HDV camera.

For the entirety of our filming, we used a Panasonic HDV camera. I found these cameras very easy to use, as I had previously used DV cameras which recorded onto a tape, which made the clips a lot harder to manipulate in post production. I found the zoom on the top of the camera was easy to operate and allowed us to create effective and professional shots. It also made it easy to quickly view clips we had previously created, as the clips were recorded straight onto an SD card as opposed to a video tape. In conjunction with a camera tripod, we were able to create smooth pans that replicated shots created in film and other music videos.

For our music video task, the main piece of software we used was a programme called Adobe Premier Pro. This allowed us to import video clips, and arrange them in succession to one another to create a understandable narrative for our music video. We used the razor tool to cut up clips and create cuts that we were happy with. I had previously worked with video editing software such as windows movie maker, but this software went into a lot more depth and allowed you to make much more precise cuts, which meant aspects of the video such as the lip sync could be a lot more accurate. It allowed us to create continuity edits, where bits of our video moved smoothly between two shot to a close up to a POV shot. However, we did find parts of this software limiting, for example when we first created our storyboard we intending to use a film grain effect on our flashback clips, which would have created a much bigger distinction between clips than our vignette. In this case, technology determined the final outcome of our video, and I think our video would have been more successful had we have been able to produce clips with a film grain effect.

Evaluation

For the evaluation stages of my media coursework, I made use of Web 2.0 and social networking sites such as Facebook. This was a quick and easy forum to broadcast my media work and receive audience feedback from quite a varied audience. I used this especially for my print production work, as I was easily able to upload an image of my digipak and advert and other facebook users were able to post comments and opinions underneath. As a result of this, Web 2.0 provided an easy way to get constructive feedback on my work, which then allowed me to improve my work and create a more successful media product.

When presenting my evaluation Microsoft Powerpoint and Slideshare.net provided an easy and more interesting way to present information. I was able to put labels on my work and demonstrate my ideas through using images and text boxes. I could then upload it to a website called slideshare.net and embed the HTML code into my blog. This is another example of Web 2.0, and corresponds to David Gauntlett's theory of a "sit-back-and-be-told" media culture transforming into a 'making and doing culture' - I was able to publish my own work on the internet and contribute to online media.