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

Blog:

Throughout all 4 stages, I used my blog to upload my work that I had been making, as well as chart my progress. My blog can be found here - http://alex-jarvis.blogspot.co.uk/. The blog proved useful in being able to simply upload my work, and then from there edit it at anytime, as well as compare it to others. The comments section also proved useful in term of audience feedback and teacher comments.

My blog also proved useful in raising FEAR THE UNKNOWNS profile, and generating audience feedback. At this time of writing my blog has received over 1100 views, and so I have successfully achieved in raising their profile.

My blog has also allowed me to become much organised with my work, due to the labelling structure. With each post, I can simply add a label and that post will be placed into a section with my blog, which I can easily access at any time. For example, if I labelled a post Evaluation, I would only have to go onto the evaluation label section to find that post.

As well as using Blogger, I also used many other internet sites to distribute my work, use surveys, and gain audience feedback. One site was Survey Monkey, from which I created an online survey. I used this free website in order to create an online survey from which to distribute across many other websites. Survey Monkey proved useful in that once distributed, the responses were collected instantly online and in useful graphs and bar charts for us to easily depict.

We distributed this survey, and our video, on the two main social networking sites, Twitter and Facebook. These two sites offer great reception in terms of audience, and so helped in audience feedback as well as gaining exposure for the band.

We also used the video sharing website Youtube in order to upload are video onto to. This site allowed us to easily link our video onto various websites, as well as helping to find our target audience using the ability of the audience statistics that Youtube offers.

Metal forums such as stereokiller and AllMetalForums allowed us to distribute our video and surveys across sites that catered for our target audience. This was aimed at gathering information that was high in validity.

To upload my work I have used and been using Slideshare in all of the phases shown above. This is a file sharing website, and has allowed me to upload my word documents straight onto my blog, thus allowing my work to be well presented and organised.

Music Video:

During the filming of our video that main camera we used was a HVR-HD 1000E. We had two of these in shooting, and they proved very useful in giving a clear picture, and also giving back decent audio. We also used a HD mini DV camcorder. The reason for using both types of cameras was evident. They allowed us to be much more flexible and get a lot more shots. The smaller size of the HD mini cam allowed us to get shots from where the other

larger camera may not have allowed, such as when shooting behind Callum. It also gave a more wild nature to that of the more steady fixed position HVR, and so conformed to the nature of Metal videos.

When editing our video, we used the programme IMOVIE, doing this on a college iMac. This programme was not difficult to use, as we had already grown accustomed to it after editing other pieces of media coursework and work. We used iMovie to change the lighting of our video to ‘Cartoon’, as well as changing the contrast and brightness of our footage. I also used the iMac to produce my other work except form my print productions, to produce these, as well as general work and research, I used my own laptop, a HP Pavilion.

Print Productions:

During making my print products, I used the programme PhotoShop. From this programme I was able to make my products my cropping images, constructing new images, drawing, and adding text and colour. I struggled to get the hang of this programme at first as it is very complex, but after working hard, I eventually gathered enough knowledge in how to use it effectively to make my products. Some of the ways in which I did this was by using the pen tool, ‘extracting’, typing, and retouching.