Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the

construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of your Advanced

Portfolio.

Research and Planning

During the research and planning stage of our coursework, we used a range of media technologies to assist us. For example we used mobile phones for organisational purposes.

I used my HTC Sensation Xe smartphone. It was great for internet browsing away from home and allowed me to communicate with my group.

I used my mobile phone for communication with the other members of my group, I also used it for ‘Google Maps’ to navigate around Market Rasen to find possible locations that could be used for our music video. The app allowed me to zoom in on specific locations and see street view images of those locations. This was helpful in deciding on locations to use for our video, as we could see a 360º panoramic view of the location

Another application I used on my phone was ‘Opera Mini Web Browser’. This is a reliable and much faster internet browser than the standard one as it only downloads vital information from a webpage, which made researching and planning our video away from home much faster.

My phone features an 8.0 Megapixel camera that I used to take relatively good quality location stills of possible places we could use for our music video.

I used Bluetooth to upload the location stills taken from my mobiles camera to the Macs that we used to create our video.

I created an alternate home screen on my phone in order to have quick access to any tools I would

need whilst producing our music video.

I used these applications to communicate with my group members

I used the phones music player to play the song for our performers to sing to.

I used these applications to take location stills, record test clips and then view them on the phone.

I used these applications to conduct research and update my progress on the music video.

Polaris Office allowed me to view Microsoft Office files that I had produced on the computer.

I used these applications to keep track of our shooting schedule and check weather conditions to see if they would be appropriate for filming.

I used a variety of other programmes on the Macs provided to us by our media department, programmes such as Microsoft Word and Publisher allowed me to create documents containing research and planning for our music video. For example, I produced a risk assessment for our video using Microsoft Word and used Publisher to create a shooting schedule for our music video. Excel was useful, as it allowed me to input data collected from our questionnaire and convert this data into different graphs, that we could then easily analyse and evaluate.

Also I used a variety of websites to assist me in my research and planning stage. I used Google as my primary search engine for research, and YouTube was helpful to view current examples of music videos from the genre of music I had chosen for my music video. I used Blogger to record my progress through my Advanced Portfolio in Media.

To film our video we used a Panasonic N-GS500 video camera along with a SONY tripod. We connected this camera to the Apple Mac using a Fire wire.

Construction

We used a Velbon DV7000 Tripod to keep the video camera steady whilst filming our music video. It also allowed us to pan the camera smoothly.

During the construction stage of our music video, The main programme I used to edit the footage we had recorded was Adobe Premiere Pro, this is a piece of editing software that allows you to edit audio and video into a timeline sequence. I found Premiere Pro very useful for editing our video, as the video uses lots of fast shots which would be very difficult to piece together without the use of an organised timeline.

We used the ‘Clip Speed/Duration’ tool to edit the speed of the cars in one of our shots. We did this to insinuate the passing of time, and I feel that the shot worked rather well.

We used Premiere Pro to create a nice final shot for our music video, we added a dip to black GPU transition to create a nice finish for the video. We changed the brightness and contrast of the final video clip to make it slightly

We used a Nikon Coolpix L23 camera to take the pictures for our Digipak and magazine cover. This camera produced high quality pictures that would be a suitable standard for an album cover. Also the camera was used to take pictures of our artists

This is a picture taken on the Nikon Coolpix that we used as our final front cover for the digipak.

We used Photoshop to create our ancillary tasks, Photoshop provided us with a vast amount of customization for our Digipak and magazine advert, it offered a vide variety of font styles and textures for the text, as well as filters, effects and transformations for the images used on the ancillary tasks. Also we could download the templates of the CD cover and load them directly into Photoshop which made getting the correct sizes for the Digipak very simple.

We took this photo whilst in Lincoln, however we hadn’t noticed that the date and time had been set to show up on the picture. When we returned home to transfer the pictures to the computer, we were very happy with the image but had the problem of the text in the bottom right hand corner of the picture. I used the clone stamp tool to take a small sample of the picture around the text, and then carefully patched over the text.

Dafont is a website that allows you to download new font styles for Photoshop. We downloaded a font called Praetorian which we used as part of our brand identity for our three media products. We felt this font suited the style of the artists, as it was not too bold, but it is recognisable and catches the audiences’ attention.

We used a website called Barcode-Generator, to create a barcode for our Digipak. We also created a ‘Quick Response’ code, which allows smart-phone users to scan the code and be taken to the website for the band, however our ‘QR’ code, this added an authentic look to the digipak.

EvaluationDuring the evaluation stage of our Music Video, continued to use Blogger to update my progress. Also I used SlideShare to convert Microsoft PowerPoint files into a form I could insert into my Blog, this improved the multimedia aspect of my blog. I used YouTube and Facebook to display our Music video in order to obtain audience feedback, Also we used a recording studio to provide an audial commentary talking about the effectiveness of the combination of our media products as part of our evaluation.