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

RESEARCH AND PLANNING

Blogger- We used Blogger a lot in our project to write about our work through out the course. Blogger was good as it was easy to use to keep track of our progress throughout the course . We blogged every thing we have done throughout the course , from introduction to   our project to the evaluation of our project. Blogger was useful as we could embed pictures and videos to show where we were getting our ideas and inspiration from. We could also embed all of our planning documents – such as our target audience questionnaire and shooting schedule. I used Blogger  constantly updating  ideas and progress, after filming shoots and editing days.

blogger was also good for us to get feedback from our teacher. after uploading a task we get feedback as a comment from our teacher. this helped as to improve the quality of our products . we were also able to get other comments from other people. blogger was also acceptable on any thing, phone, ipad, laptop so we were able to do our work from anywhere any time we wanted. this was an advantage for as as we only had few lessons in school and had not enough time to complete all the work at school.

YOUTUBE: We used YouTube to research real media texts, and to understand the basic codes and conventions of professional, mainstream dance  music videos.  It was  helpful to look at other music videos, as we wanted to know what the codes and conventions of dance music are. after watching videos we decided to follow some of the conventions and challenge certain conventions of dance music video , such as performance. Analysing music videos was effective in inspiring us to interpret different conventions into our music video, for example, from the video 'HIGH'  we were inspired to similar camera shot. 

YouTube was also useful in researching existing A2 videos, as this helps to show that creating a successful video can be done with a low budget. music videos  gave us guidance with camera angles and body language.

phone -My phone helped me during the planning stage as it was great for organisation and meeting up with my partner and making plans on when was best to film. During the filming stage, we took lots of pictures on our phone and we sent it to our iMacs . It was very useful to discuss any work with my work partner . We also got feed back from audience through whatsup.

Final cut pro-Final Cut Pro was an important software in the construction of our video, In AS we used imovie. Final cut pro is much more complex than iMovie .  final cut pro offers more transitions and effects than iMovie. This was helpful for our post production stages as it enabled us to manipulate clips, allowing us to change the mood and effect of  certain scenes. For example we used lots of effects to show the present  and memory scene.Effects we used often was 'black and white ' and 'cam record ' which we used for our sad scenes and happy scene . This helped to make our clips look more attractive and the camrecord effect made it look like we were filming each other. we were also able to stabilise our videos.

CONSTRUCTION

final Cut Pro has features like  blade tool . our chosen was very fast and we wanted to cut the clip at certian beats which were quite short , the blade tool was very easy to use and was very helpful to cut our scene. This made slicing clips much more easier and much quicker , helping speed up the process of joining our clips together.

final cut pro was  also more accessible compared to imovie. when we connected the camera to the computer, the software opens up a window for us to select the clips we want to import, and then import straight away. this made the process less time consuming.

iMac -  the iMac was used to operate the various software. After filming, we uploaded our footage unto the iMac  and uploaded it to final cut pro , here we chose the footage we wanted to include in the video, and  edited the video, added video transitions, and  matched the filming to the song. i mac was very use full as we were able to download various editing apps.

Photoshop - We also used Adobe Photoshop to make a poster for our digipak poster and our cd cover .Photoshop was also useful in making our logo.  We found that Photoshop was most useful as it had lots of features  like the magic wand, and other tool which allowed us to delete some part of the photos.

cannon EOS 600D - We used a Canon EOS 600D to do some filming, which was effective in filming due to the portability of the camera, and the features included. Such as being able to change the camera settings for a particular lighting, to avoid saturating the clip too much. we were also able to record as much as clips as the camera had a large space/memory. This allowed as to record each scene from every angles with out having to worry about memory. the camera was also light weight so we were able to travel every where with it.the camera can be attached to tripod which was very useful when filming because most of our scenes stable. 

Evaluation

Facebook/Twitter - To get feedback from our target audience we put our video unto social networking sites, sites such as Facebook and Twitter. social networks  allowed me to share my video with my  friends and they could comment on my video and say what they thought about it. My online friends were also able to help me share my video so that others could view it and comment on it. 

Blogger - To show the progression of our project, we uploaded our work onto blogger. This allowed us to post most of our steps to making of the video, along with our pre-production work. Blogger  also helped us to gain audience feedback much quicker and much more easily compared to  through a questionnaire. we were able to get feedbacks from student and our teacher.This meant that we could make changes to our video as soon as possible, speeding up our process.Blogger was used to record our filming, editing, research and planning activities that was done throughout our process. Blogger was easy to access on the iMac. we  kept my blog up to date. It was used to summarise processes, embedding images and embedding videos. 

 YouTube - It is a site that ,  users can upload, view and share videos. we shared our video on YouTube . This made it easy for everyone watch it as videos on YouTube is  very easily accessible. you tube can show the amount of times our  video has been viewed, amount of ‘likes’ our video has gotten and can get  comments from other people worldwide . On YouTube people can comment or like peoples videos.

 PowerPoint/Slideshare was used during  my evaluation. we used PowerPoint to map out all  the visual presentation  in order to post it on the blog. we used power point and slide share to write our evaluation questions.