Media Advanced Portfolio Evaluation

Question Four ; How did you use new media technologies in the

construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the planning stages of my advanced portfolio I used the suit of application available within Google Drive, as it allowed me to access any of my documents anywhere with an internet connection including my mobile phone via their app. This gave me a great deal of freedom as I didn't have to carry around a physical memory stick at all times which could be misplaced or damaged, another great feature is the fact that you can download for instance a Google Slides document as a PowerPoint, PDF, TXT file (etc) so your work is compatible for almost any format that is required.

-) Google docs was used to make analysis and general notes as well as to write some of the posts for my Wordpress blog, as it’s interface was easier to navigate than that on the blog itself. I also used it plan out some of the pre - production aspects of the video shoot such as grouping locations together to make the process simpler.

-) Google Slides was used for any of my personal slide based presentations on my blog for instance my music video analysis (post two) which was downloaded as a PowerPoint (.pptx) file and uploaded to SlideShare within a matter of minutes. This very presentation is using Google Slides due to it’s simple and effective interface.

The website SurveyMonkey was used during our audience research phase of planning, we set up a survey using a total of ten questions ranging from the participants gender and age to their personal tastes as well as their perception of the BritPop genre. This information shaped our music video and ancillary texts as we now had factual evidence to base our decisions off throughout the planning stages of production. ( Results for the survey can be found on Post Three) YouTube was used to find examples of music within our chosen

genre for my music video analysis which allowed me to observe common tropes and conventions to include in our own video. We also used YouTube to post the finished music video onto the internet, in doing this we received some feedback that touched on the good and bad points within it.

SlideShare was used as there was no solution to posting my Google Slides or PowerPoint presentation directly onto my WordPress blog, with SlideShare however I was able to upload said presentations onto their website which would then give me an embedding code for my blog. This platform allowed me to present my work in an easily accessible manner which did not overcrowd my advanced portfolio blog, and helped to streamline both the planning and evaluation stages of the project.

WordPress is being used to host this advanced portfolio blog; the website allows me to post all of my planning and research along with the production and final version of our music video. It’s streamlined interface is simple and easy to use, this however can be limiting when it comes to personalisation with it having no custom font options within it’s free templates, it also does not allow Prezi presentations to posted directly onto the blog something that I would have liked to have been able to include.Social media platforms like Facebook were used to post the SurveyMonkey survey and our music video for participation and feedback to a large quantity of people. This then allowed us to both receive information that we could then put into our practices within our video, and the feedback from the finished product then allowed us to see what aspects of the video people did and did not respond to which was then used for the deconstruction of the video during our individual evaluations.

Adobe Photoshop was used to create both our final and mock up versions of our promotional poster and digipak. We chose this piece of software due to it’s advanced set of tools which allowed us to create pretty much anything we wanted for each of the two ancillary texts. However due to the aforementioned vast array of tools at our disposal we did not have the technical knowhow to fully utilize them fully. Various online FAQs did help with this in the long run.

Adobe Premiere was used to edit the footage together after principle photography was complete. We were able to layer the VHS effect over the footage within Premiere by downloading a file which consisted of the required level of static, then by changing its opacity we were able to emulate the desired effect. This is also where we synced the audio and visuals together, this process was fairly straight forward with the exception being the lip syncing scenes with the band and the scene with the guitar player strumming.

The use of a DSLR meant that we could simply place any of the footage that we had recorded straight from the camera onto the PC for it to be edited. A decade ago this would have had to be done using analogue tape cameras which would have to be transferred manually using a machine into a digital format, this process was time consuming and the technologie produced low quality footage compared to the HD 1080p resolution used for our music video.

Modern PC’s gave us the processing power we required to run applications like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere which are renowned at being slow and even crashing older computers. New technology advancements however have made it possible for regular consumers to be able to afford a PC with the required specs to run such programs.