A2 Media evaluation

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

What I used for research and how I recorded it

I got most of my research from the internet. I got various different pictures of music magazine covers and advertisements and different album covers. I did this so I could get different ideas from all the pictures and put them together to make my advertisement and my album cover. I recorded all of my research on my blog. I also looked at various different magazines as well to see how the publisher had laid out the magazine and the adverts as well.

Pictures I used for researchThis is one of the album covers I got off the internet. It wasn’t the type of music we where doing and this wasn’t how I wanted my album cover to look, but I thought that it would be better to get a different variety of album covers to get a better out look on how to start my album cover and how to lay it out also how to make it look as professional as possible.

I got the idea of not having the band on the front cover from this album here. It shows the type of genre the music is, just by the colours and the picture behind it, this goes for the album cover at the top as well.

Pictures I used for research

This is the front cover of a music magazine. I wasn’t doing a magazine cover but I thought the front of the magazine helped me get an idea of what to make the advert look like so it would fit in with the type of magazine.

I took the idea for my magazine advertisement from this Madonna promotion here. I liked the colours and the fact the writing had a bold background around it. This is what I did for the name of the band and the title of the single, this makes it stand out.

How I recorded my research

For our coursework we have to record everything on to a blog. This is because we can show the examiner that we are able to use different technologies and keep our information modern. We weren't allowed to write it in essay for either so we had to include pictures and videos that we used for research. I think after using the blog last year its actually easier to use than writing an essay and keeping various different bits of paper.

This is what the blog page looks like when you have to start up your blog. You have your own password and username so only you can sign in and make an changes. You cant loose any work and its easy to maintain.

Music video research

For our music video we decided to just have natural surroundings, for example we just had parts of cities bus rides and fields. So I researched abstract music videos to get an idea of what we could used in our video.

<object width="640" height="390"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7vxYaEAyTd4&hl=en_GB&feature=player_embedded&version=3"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7vxYaEAyTd4&hl=en_GB&feature=player_embedded&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="390"></embed></object> This is one of the music videos that I used to get

inspiration from. This music video gave us most of our ideas of what we wanted to put into our video.

PhotoshopI used photoshop every time I had to edit a picture. First of all I found it

difficult to use as it was my first time using. But after a while I managed to get used to it, but I can only use the settings I know how, so if someone asked to me to do something completely different I wouldn’t be able to help. I think this was the only problem with photoshop, there wasn’t really any help on the programme you either had to ask someone who was skilled in using it or just figure it out for yourself, my partner who was in my group was able to help me but when she wasn’t there I did it on my own, it took a while but I managed it.

This is one of the pictures I created for my coursework. I didn’t use this picture in the end and created something else, but I think that this photo shows what you can create using photoshop.

PhotoshopThis is another one of my designs. This is for my poster that will go into the album for promoting reasons. I took this photo and edited it to the way I wanted it to look so it would fit in well with the rest of my coursework. I still have a bit of work to do to this one but this is just to show how I used photoshop.

This is my album cover. This was also done on photoshop as well. Some of the designs took a bit longer than the others as I was still working out how to use photoshop.

Other evaluation QuestionsFor my other evaluation questions I had to use different

technologies and sites to answer the questions. For question one and two I used a presentation site called prezzi, this allows you to create a modern and interesting presentation for the examiner to look at. You can have a different coloured background and you are able to create paths that moves from one question to another. It looks confusing when you first use it but once you get the hang of it its actually very easy to use. I think it looks confusing when you use the paths and it moves around but it shows that I am able to use this presentation site again when I need to with out any problems.

This is an example of someone prezzi, I took this picture off the internet so you can see what it looks like.

Question 3

For question 3 we had to get feedback from the audience that watched our videos, we asked them some questions to see what they thought of the video and what we could of done better. We used a camera to record them so you can also see their faces as well when they answer the questions, their voices are also recorded on to the camera as well so we didn’t need to use a microphone for them to talk into. I enjoyed doing this one and I think the result for this question was good, we got various different answers and the answers where helpful as well. I would use this technique again for any other coursework I need to do. It might only take five minutes but the outcome is extremely good.