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

      Media technologies were used throughout the course of the whole product, but as mentioned earlier there was a learning curve when it came to using some of the technologies. The majority of the research and evaluation stages mainly required the use of word document for writing out and planning the different blog entries and responses to the questions, and to map out how everything would look. When it came to research the internet became the most useful tool, as through the use of the bands own website and Youtube, it allowed me to gather all the research I required to start work on my own look for the band whilst staying true to the bands own look and style. Youtube was the most effective website when it came to gathering research on other music videos, and as I mainly used the bands back catalogue of music videos, Youtube was the only website that has these music videos, so it proved very useful in that respect. Google images also became something that was highly useful when researching the digi pack and the magazine advert. This applied more to the magazine advert, as a lot of the research for the digi pack came from actually looking through real digi packs, to get ideas for design and how it should look, and what kind of style it should take shape. But Google images proved very effective when looking at magazine adverts as it had multiple different examples for each different style of genre, so we knew which direction to take the advert in terms of a look that fitted and suited the band, as well as fitting with the bands image. Although this research showed most magazine adverts have very similar layouts and designs, with the only real difference being the visuals present on the advert. Microsoft Publisher, was something that became useful in the planning stage of the advert, as before using Adobe Photoshop to create the final text products, we used publisher as a way of mapping out and planning what we wanted, in particular the advert, to look like. The digi pack wasn’t planned out on this software as at this point I was still coming up for a hand drawn idea for the digi pack before that idea was replaced with a all photo digi pack. In the actual creation stages, the only two software’s that were mainly used was Adobe Premier Pro and Photoshop, both of which came with a slight learning curve for me personally, as I had very little experience in both, as I didn’t use them that much in my AS project. However once this curve was passed, both played the most effective part of the project, as without them, the video and the texts wouldn’t be up to such a quality standard, and I became quite fluent and confident in my skills at using these software’s. This came from countless hours at both software’s, changing, adding, tampering and constantly modifying both the video and texts, constantly adding more details and reducing same parts, and as mentioned, make some major and minor changes. One final thing that played an important part was the camera I used, which once again came with a very slight learning curve as it was a new camera, so required me going over it and learning the different functions on it and how to operate it properly. I was also a lot more hands on with the operating of the camera, as in AS we used my then partners own camera, so he did the majority of the camera work. One thing that was a letdown in terms of the technology used to film was the multiple tripods we used. Besides one we borrowed from Mr Earl, which actual worked, the other two we used either broke or were too unstable and kept falling over. Which resulted in the majority of the band footage to be shot by hand or using objects stacked up to capture full band shots if we were without a camera operator for a certain reason.