A2 Music Video EvaluationQuestion 4Toby Penny

Question 4: “How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?”Throughout the creation of our music video, we used media technologies every minute to research for our video, organise the filming and plan and evaluate it. Some examples of technologies we used are Adobe programs such as Premiere – to edit the video and Photoshop – to create the digi-pack and advertisement, Microsoft programs such as Word – to write up our evaluation and PowerPoint to present it. We also used our phones to communicate with each other and digital cameras to film the video. Google also played a big role in the creation of our video; we used google drive to share documents between us which makes it easier for us to show consistency in our work. Also we used Blogger (which is another Google website) to display all our work.

• We used Adobe Photoshop to create our Digi-pack and music advertisement. The extensive tools in Photoshop allowed us to create stuff of a professional standard.

• Some tools which came in really useful in Photoshop are the colour overlay and lasso tools. The colour overlay tool allows you to easily change the colour of a whole picture to make it fit in with the theme and the lasso tool allows us to easily cut around pictures to make it seem as if they are in a different place, we did this, although we didn’t use it in our final product.

Using Adobe products to create our work - Photoshop

Using Photoshop allowed us to create a brand for out record company and keep it consistent throughout the video and album cover.

Using Adobe products to create our work - Premiere• I used Premiere largely to help create my media products, it is the main

program that we used to edit our music video which we then uploaded to YouTube, I also used it to edit my vox-pop, where I ask people questions to gain research to be used in the creation of the video.

• Premiere has lots of tools to use. Some of the most useful tools include- Cutting tool: this allows us to cut scenes down and take out any parts that we don’t want included- Linking and unlinking: this allows us to remove the sound from a clip – this was particularly useful in the music video more than the vox pop because it allows us to add our own music over the top, and the video doesn’t really include any sound (other than the song)- Adding effects: The effects were useful for us to personalise the video and make the transitions smoother, for example it always looks better when it fades rather than a straight cut.

• When making the vox pop the audio gain tool came in very useful, this is to make sure that the background music isn't too loud and the people can be heard, you can make the audio louder as to be heard over the music and you can also take the music down in decibels.

The audio is separated here so that it can be louder on the shots that read out the questions

Using Google products to create our work

Using Google Drive allowed us to easily share documents between each other making it a lot easier to create the video. Google Drive is also available in an app on our phones where we took some of the video and most of our photos, this makes it easy to transfer to the computer, and import into premiere and Photoshop to edit.Blogger allowed us to present our work in a clear manner and make it easily accessible. There are many reasons why we used a blogger, for example it is much easier to edit our work once we have already posted it, if we spot a mistake, also it is much more eco friendly than printing everything out. It also makes the work easily accessible to get feedback from

Using Google products to create our work - YouTube

YouTube was the biggest media technology that we used in creating our work. When we first started planning our music video we used YouTube to search for previous A2 Student videos, this allowed us to see the kind of things we should include.We also used YouTube to find the song we used for our music video, we found Lil Simz an unsigned artist from London. Using YouTube also allowed us to evaluated real life media texts for example existing music videos and vox pops which we had to do for our preliminary tasks.We used YouTube to display our Vox-pop, music video and evaluation to make it accessible to people.

Using Microsoft products to create our work

In this particular task I used Microsoft products a lot less than I would in anything else, this is because of the presence of Google Drive – Google makes it a lot easier to create documents and share them over the internet, which is why I opted to use that.Despite this I did still use Microsoft PowerPoint to show my evaluation and audience feedback – transferring it to my blog from there was a bit more difficult than if I used Google Slides because it means I needed to upload it to Slide share, a website that allows you to display PowerPoints online.

Using Social Media and Smartphones to create our work

We used our phones a great deal in the creation of our work, we used them both for the production as well as the planning of our video. We used our phones to ask the person who is in our music video to be in it and plan what time we are going to shoot it.We used Social Media to get people to answer our questionnaire, we sent it out to the class via Gmail. The answers to these questionnaires then allowed us to know what people wanted to see in our video and we implemented this when creating it

Using Devices to create our work

To film our music video we used two cameras: first of all we used a Sony flip video recorder that was provided by the school, however after shooting our first lot of scenes we realised that the quality wasn’t as good as we had hoped on these cameras and the battery was very unreliable. We then switched to use the camera built into our phones, however this also put us at a disadvantage because we couldn’t use a tripod to keep it steady.

Despite this the camera shots using a phone are still pretty steady and work well with the other shots, even though they are different standards of quality.