HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?There are many ways in which the use of media technologies has improved and helped creativity within this project. When beginning the project, the research stages included essential use of technology. The band that we chose to use are not very established in the music industry yet; they are an unsigned local band meaning there was little information on the internet about them that we could use for our research. Mainly, we used social media in the form of facebook to get information about the band and to get in touch with them. Facebook has been especially useful in this respect as we were able to keep in constant contact with the band to ask any questions that we may have. For example, the initial message sent was to ask for permission to use the song. This was useful as we could get a direct response, whereas if we had chosen to use a largely commercial band or song, there would be little chance of actually getting permission from a famous record label. The use of facebook also contributed to the actual music video as we could see updates that the band posted; one post revealed that there would be a local show. We therefore took the opportunity to go and film some live footage of the band playing a gig which we have included to give the music video a live performance element. This would not have been possible without social media. Facebook messenger was also useful as the whole project was based around group work; this meant that the group needed to be in constant communication to discuss ideas, delegate tasks and arrange meetings for filming sessions. Facebook messenger was the most ideal way of doing this as it is very a convenient modern technology.

Social media has also made a big contribution in the research stages. We created a questionnaire on a site called survey monkey in order to gain audience research. This is a very useful tool as it is very easy to use as you create your own questions and the style that you want them in and it analyses the results of the survey for you to produce qualitative and quantitative data. I posted this survey on facebook to get responses from as many people as possible and get the best content about what an audience wants. We gained over 100 responses which was great for the audience research because it allowed us to see what our target market was interested in and how to include this in our products.

The research and planning stages included a lot of discussion as it is a group project. We decided to document this and record some of our discussion on a smartphone as evidence. We then uploaded this sound clip onto soundcloud - another modern way of listening to music - and then this could be embedded onto our blogs. We were taking notes during our discussions, however, we concluded that this was a more creative and interesting way to display it and it also continued the use of more technologies.

The basis of all of our coursework had to be uploaded onto a blog and for this I used blogger; I believe it is important to make the work I upload to my blog visually interesting as well as informative; media technologies have assisted me in doing this. For example, using google slides allows for different layouts and colour schemes rather than a simple microsoft word document. The presentations made on google slides then have to be uploaded to a site called slideshare so that it can be embedded onto my blog. Attaching the files in this way makes them a lot clearer for any visitors to my blog.

As part of our research, the group decided to record a video of ourselves reacting to some music videos as a form of analysis; this was a decision made with the aim of creating a new and different platform for the analysis, instead of it being in a written format. The video was filmed using a Nikon D60 Digital SLR Camera and edited using iMovie. We chose to use this software as it was simple to use and we thought it would be a more appropriate technology for the small taskat hand, considering we knew that later in the project we would be using Premiere. This meant that we had created diversity in our editing techniques and also been more efficient as this software was less time consuming and due to this video only being part of the research stages, this meant that the quality of the video needn’t be as polished as the music video for example because the level of professionalism needed was much less.

When trying to upload our video we came across an obstacle due to the fact that featuring the song in our reaction video created some copyright issues. This made it impossible to upload the video to Youtube and instead we chose to upload it to another video sharing site named Vimeo. This alternative platform allowed us to avoid any further issues as we could get an embed code from this and transfer it to our blogs. This shows the group’s initiative when faced with a problem and it also meant that the range of technologies used expanded.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 was used a lot during the planning and production stages as we already had experience from the first year of media studies; this meant that we didn’t come across many problems and if we did, we knew how to solve them immediately, making the process fast and easy. When planning we used this software to compile images into a mock up for the digipak that we were later going to create; this displayed the style and the type of images that we wanted to include in the final digipak. In the production stages we used photoshop to create the final digipak and magazine advert. Our new and

more developed understanding of photoshop allowed us to create two very professional looking products. The magazine advert is all based around the original photo that was taken at the Faus Pax gig. The photo was taken on a Fujicolour Superia Colour 400 then manipulated to create the effects that you see. The background of the whole advert was created by using the pipette tool; we picked up the colour from the photo and applied this to the background to create continuity. There are lots of small details that photoshop made possible which make the advert seem much more professional - for example, in the bottom left corner the tag for Instagram has a gradient over it to make it look more realistic by matching the actual instagram logo. In addition to this, the other red and yellow text was achieved by duplicating one layer, recolouring it and then moving it slightly so it was visible underneath the other. This creates a more visually appealing look, instead of one block colour. We made the yellow colour on the release date brighter to make it stand out more to an audience. The stars on the advert were copied and duplicated from a Q magazine to make them look more realistic. The lines that appear above and below the main image on the advert were put there to make the shot feel more authentic and make it flow on the page better. This was done by taking an image of film edges and then using the magic wand and quick selection tool to cut out the parts that we wanted and placing them on the advert. The detailed use of all of these tools clearly shows improvement from our previous work. It also exhibits creativity and the skills we have utilised when using technology. For the digipak, similar technology and tools were used to create the images and the effects on them. The digipak consists of images and text - the fonts were all taken from ‘dafont.com’ then extracted and dragged into a fonts folder where we could then see them on Photoshop and resize them with the text tool. Using this site allowed us to have multiple fonts that are all interesting.

The filming process for our group was difficult and we faced a few problems. As i mentioned in my post for the pre-evaluation, the first few filming sessions were irrelevant as we did not end up using them. For these sessions we used a Nikon D60 SLR camera because it is of good quality. We used this camera with a tripod and sometimes a shoulder mount to balance it. These are the cameras the college provide for us to use, and although we had never had any previous issues, on one of the filming sessions we discovered that the Nikon camera that we had been given was not working. At this point in the project we were on a tight schedule and

needed to get the video filmed as quickly as possible. We did not want the broken camera to hinder our progress so we decided to use another group member’s iPhone 7 to shoot the video. We had previously seen other media studies music videos on youtube that had been filmed on a smartphone and these were of a very high standard. The iphone 7 has a 12 mega-pixel camera which is impressive for a smartphone and it also has optical image stabilisation; this ensured that there were no issues with the shots looking shaky or hand held, as this was a worry when we realised we would no longer be able to use a tripod with the iphone. The shots taken with the iphone ended up looking better quality than those we had already shot with the camera and therefore we went back and refilmed some things for consistency purposes. This shows our group’s initiative yet again as instead of giving up, we were persistent in filming and found a solution which actually benefitted us. The use of technology was very important as it was extremely convenient, easily accessible and allowed us to create better quality footage for the video.The most important technology software in the production process was Adobe Premiere CS6; we chose this as the editing software for the music video as it was the most advanced. This was an extremely useful software as it enables you to edit the footage in an unchronological order. This was an advantage because we could organise clips at the end of the sequence before the beginning if we wanted to. Each member of the group spent some time editing the video so it was fair and through this i developed my skills further. We were able to add the audio and cut the clips down to the size we wanted and then put them in an order which looked visually appealing and fitted in time with the music. We did things such as adding effects and transitions to the clips as well as enhancing audio and contrast levels. There were some clips that looked slightly different to the rest, so instead of re-filming, we decided to adjust the contrast and brightness levels of the clips so that they didn’t look noticeably different. Premiere was also used in the evaluation stages when editing the short audience feedback video.

YouTube was another essential technology during this project; it was used during the research stages for the textual analysis as the videos we analysed could be accessed easily and re-watched as many times as we wanted to get as much detail about them as possible. Through this, the group realised that this was definitely the most used music video sharing site and so this is where we uploaded the final video. Uploading videos to YouTube is a very quick and easy process and we recognised that this was a good way to

allow our video to reach a large audience in the quickest time. Another advantage of using YouTube is that it creates a very easy way to embed the videos onto our blogs. Another key piece of software that was necessary was a site called slideshare; I chose to use a blogger account to upload my coursework to and because of this slideshare was very helpful as it is not possible to upload a powerpoint straight onto blogger. A way around this problem is to upload the presentation to slideshare and then use the embed code to transfer this to my blog. This code then allows me to compose the link which then creates an effortless viewing experience that people can see instead of them being forced to manually click on a link which can be time consuming. As well as using google slides to present my work, microsoft word has also been very useful in the

process of research and planning. I use this software less often than google slides merely because I feel that powerpoints have more of a visual appeal, however, for simple documents, microsoft word is perfect. For example, we used word when creating the shot list and shooting schedule as this did not have to look attractive in any way and we felt this would be the most efficient way of getting the job done.