How did you use new media technologies in the CONSTRUCTION, RESEARCH, PLANNING and EVALUATION stages?

RESEARCH

Our practical research mainly consisted of web 2.0 in which the use of prosumers, upload there work onto sites such as YouTube. The functioning of this video search engine enabled us to access a whole variety of information including existing music videos from the genre of choice, to tips on filming and lighting set ups. I felt that this majorly helped us to progress our media knowledge and develop our product especially in comparison to our AS practical. The research also helped us to establish what we wanted, and how we were to do it, which in the end paid off in producing a high quality and professional feeling promotional package. The internet was therefore a massive educational tool that we were able to easily access on a variety of platforms in a variety of ways which helped us to research for our practical.

PLANNING

Throughout the many stages of our practical, new media tecnologies have been a major part of our product. The planning stage of our practical was mainly centred around conversations between both me and Ryan. A lot of this took place face to face, however when this was not available, social networking sites such as Facebook came into there own. The ability to easily upload videos, photos and textual information and talk to a variety of people at the same time gave the option of actually asking the opinions of other people when we were in the planning stages of our product, in an almost pre-audience feedback fashion. Another planning technique we used was to create an animatic. This was a video of drawings of proposed shots, synced to the particular track we chose, which was by The Plain White Tee’s. This enabled us to get a feel for the speed of editing that would be required and whether more/less shots would be needed, giving a rough estimate of how long our video would take to film and finally edit. However, the latter was not true as the lip-syncing aspect turned out to be rather tricky!

CONSTRUCTION

This stage was what would make our practical a success or a failure. The use of new media technologies was therefore essential. To start with the camera we used to film was a DSLR Nikon camera, which shot at a HD level. In essence the camera gave a variety of professional features such as zoom, focusing etc which went on to be a very useful set of features to have. The converting of these clips were done on MPEG streamclip, and placed onto iMac computers in order to edit on iMovie. I enjoyed editing on iMovie as the skills I had gained in my first year of media, I could develop and experiment more. One of these features was adding a montage section within the middle of our video to break it up from singing of the artist. The progression was therefore significant and I felt comfortable. Another construction tool that was used extensively within our print texts was Adobe Photoshop. The ability to transform images we had gathered, and turn them into a Digipak or Magazine Advert really gave us endless possibilities. I personally feel that our print texts set our practical apart from many other examples we have seen.

EVALUATION

I feel the most valuable tool in my arsenal when reviewing my media products was audience feedback. This proved essential from the early stages. In my intial production with WhiteComic! which was cancelled, we learnt the importance of constructive criticisms that we were keen to implement on our new creation. In essence this made the texts what they are today. The easiest way this was gained, was simply through comments on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. The instant ability to comment, like and in some instances rate a product made it easier for us to gather this feedback.