Evaluation Q.4

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

Research & Planning

• During the research and planning stages of my media product I had the opportunity to use a variety of new media technologies.• For my audience research I used websites such as UK tribes and BBC social class to find out the demographics and target audience

of the genre of music I chose.

The BBC Social Class Test made it easier to me to find out my demographics by analysing the modern British class system. They came up with a new model made up of seven groups and I used the calculator to find what group my demographic fit in. After taking the test I found out my demographic was new affluent workers who often come from working class backgrounds.

• YouTube• YouTube played a very important role when it came to my research and planning. I was able to find videos of my genre at

estimate how much of an audience I was likely to get. With views in the millions I was able to conclude that music videos of this genre are very popular and would reach a large audience.

• Focus Groups• Another important thing was interviews and focus groups. We had a focus group in class where we discussed not only our ideas

for our music videos but also ideas for our digipaks and magazine adverts. This was very helpful because it gave me an idea of what I needed to change and generally gave me an opinion of how my music video might turn out and if they would watch it.

Also very helpful were the interviews I carried out. Initially interviewing two people they both had very different opinions in music. One who enjoyed rap music while the other R&B. The interview helped me figure out what song to choose and also what and what not to put in my music video. This made matters a whole lot easier when it came to filming and editing because one of the people interviewed made a comment saying she enjoyed the way R&B music videos were as it is and said she would not like them any other way.So for my music video I decided to use most of the forms and conventions of real media, not really changing anything but adding maybe one or two things to make it my own and not look copied.

• Editing the music video is a very important task which would determine the content that would be on both my digipak and magazine advert. So to make sure this was done properly I needed a software that would have all the tools necessary to make my video and be easy as well.

• The software that was made available to me was Movie Studio Platinum. This software was very easy to use and also had all the tools I needed to make my music video.

• There were also a number of other websites which we used during this whole period. One of which was Prezi.

With Prezi I was able to document my progress with my music video, digipak, and magazine advert. Also documented were my ancillary tasks and relative information needed. Prezi was a really good website to use because it made the work look fun, and it was also fun to use as well and fairly simple to grasp. For all of my presentations I used the same template which was the chalkboard, I don’t know why but I did Doing my digipak analysis was made much easier because with prezi you are able to add an array of pictures along with text even videos as well. Prezi also gave me the choice of how and where to place things along my template giving me freedom to do whatever I wanted and make a fantastic presentation.

• Another website used was blogger. Blogger gave me a landscape to put all my work. Which in total was about 40 posts in total. It also allowed me to embed videos from other websites I used like Prezi and Slidesahre which I will talk about in the next slide. It was also what I used during AS to document my work.

Blogger also made it easier for me to receive feedback from my teachers for example. Each comment and grade which was posted on each of my posts were sent directly to my e-mail address which was very convenient.

Blogger also has apps on mobile devices making it much easier for me to catch up on work because I was able to put up new posts at my convenience.

• With all of these websites being very convenient, they do have their problems sometimes. One of those problems at the time was with the website Prezi in which I wasn’t able to create and edit my work. So with that in mind I had to use Microsoft PowerPoint to continue my work. With Slideshare I was able to upload my work onto the website and embed it into Blogger to complete my posts.

Even this website had it’s slight problems but eventually was ‘usable’.

• Use of mobile phones came very much in handy with the research and planning process of my project. One of the tasks we had was to ask for the artists permission before we made our music video. This was probably for copyright.

• Another social media website I used was twitter, since this would have been the only way for me to reach out and contact my preferred artist. I also did this on a mobile device.

I was also able to use YouTube on my mobile whenever I couldn’t use a computer which was also very helpful.

Construction (Ancillary)

• Movie Studio Platinum

With movie studio platinum I was able to edit my video and create something I felt would be suitable for a high grade. Movie Studio Platinum made it very easy for my to edit my video due to the various tools and techniques that were quite easy to master.

In this part of my video I was able to enhance it by messing around with the brightness and contrast a bit, but I was also able to make it black and white which fit very well at that point of the video.Also shown was me using a cross fade so the two different shots I used could merge perfectly.Some of the other tools I used included:

• - When adding the clips to the timeline the audio from the background overlapped with the audio track. This allowed me to remove the audio track from the clip without removing the audio track.

• - With the trimmer I was able to select clips and cut out the scenes I wished to edit on my timeline.

• - Another I used was the automatic crossfade, this made it easier for me and quicker to edit my video because it automatically made a crossfade when two clips overlapped.

• Adobe Photoshop• Adobe was very helpful especially during the making of my digipak and magazine advert for my digipak.

Images before editing

I wanted to make the pictures black and white but have the gold chain still stand out as gold so I used the history tool to add the effect changing the picture from this to this.

For the image of the artist on the front cover I used black and white as well with the gold chain standing out. As you can see I wanted to use the black, white & gold as my colour scheme.

Photoshop was very easy to master and had a variety of tools which I used to my advantage. For example the texture tool came in handy a lot especially when making the CD part of my digipak. This way it did not look to plain.

• CameraHD Camera

• For my music video I was lucky enough to get to film with an HD camera. This made my work look a bit more ‘Hollywood’ if I should say, with the footage looking a lot clearer and making it loko like it was professionally done. This worked better than using an SD camera.

• Lighting

• Lighting which played a key part in my music video had to be done precisely. Using the drama room came with a lot of advantages not only because of the plain white wall but also the lights. With this I could create a background with the spotlight solemnly on the protagonist on my video which is what a lot of performance scenes in R&B music videos do.