Evaluation Question 4: Emma

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

During the period of making this project, i used several different kinds of technologies and equipment. During planning and research, we mainly used computer based technologies such as Youtube, Google and Powerpoint. But during the construction, we used more advanced technologies such as; InDesign, Photoshop and Final Cut.


Planning and Research.

During the research part of my project, using a good search engine was vital for finding out extra information on music video conventions and to look at other music videos of our genre. It was really helpful because it's constantly being updated and has thousands of pages of relevant information. Without a search engine i would not have researched has much into music videos as i did.

Youtube is a website which has thousands of videos, made by professional and novice artists. The fact that there are videos of other students past work helped us see what our video would end up being like. It also has offical music videos by artists, which helped us gather lots of inspiration from other artists of the same genre.

During research, we wanted to add extra interest to our blog posts, so we decided to put some of our research onto powerpoints, which makes it look organised and has alot of content in a small place. It's also easy to use, adding different photos and changing font styles and colours was easier on powerpoint than on the actual blogger site.

Slideshare is a free site where you can convert slideshows to put them onto blogger, without this site, we wouldn't be able to upload slideshows to our blog. Before this year i had never used Slideshare, but i found it easy and effective to use.

Microsoft Word was helpful in making our questionnaires. During our research and our evaluation, we needed questionnaires to collect our audience feedback. It was quick and easy to use and we also used it to make some posts as it is easy to organize pictures and fonts, and i found it was easier to make a presentable post on Word as opposed to blogger.

Before starting media, i had never used an IMac before, as i'm used to using Windows computers. At first, i found it difficult to get used to, but after having practice, i find these computers easy to use. They also load quickly. Another technology they have is FinalCut, which helped us when making our preliminary green screening task.

Blogger is a free blogging website in which we have organised all of our project, i've used blogger before but i still found it easy to use. Although blog post organising can be irritating when pictures don't stay where they are put, i find them an organised and effective way of storing all of our research and planning.




Construction:
HD Camera.
This is the camera in the college studio which we shot all of our footage on. It was difficult at first getting to learn how to use it because of all the different settings that had to be applied [eg; focus]. But, because this is a HD camera, it shot clearly, non grainy images which emphasised the lighting and made it a lot easier when getting to the green screening part of our task. Overall i think this camera was very helpful and time saving in our project, as without it being HD it would have taken alot more time to chroma key all of our footage.

Studio & Lights.


When filming our footage in the studio, we had to take time out before each shoot to arrange the lighting to make our footage look better. Although it was time consuming, without the light we could not achieve the brightness of our video and it would not look as pop as it does. However, the only problem with the lighting was  if they got hot you could get burnt, luckily, this never happened while we was filming.
The studio in general was the most helpful during the construction stage. Without it, we would not have been able to use a green screen, so wouldn't have been able to make our video American themed as quickly or as successfully as we did with the studio on hand to film. The only downside to using the studio was not being able to add realism to our video, and being able to book filming around our timetables. Other than that, without the studio our video would not have been successful.

Digital Camera.

We used a digital camera to take the photos for our print project, even though it is a basic camera, it was effective in capturing our photos with the help of the studio lighting. This camera was easy to use and took a good quality picture to say it is only 10 mega pixels.





Computer Technologies: 
InDesign.

When constructing our print project, InDesign was a vital part in achieving a successful piece of work. It is used for organising the images to put together the album inserts. I found InDesign easy to use as i used it last year when doing my coursework. I think it's worked successfully for us as our print work was finished quickly and to a good standard. It also has a wide range of effects to use and it's easy to get interesting fonts from Dafont.com to the fonts list on Indesign. 
I used it for organising our print project and found it helpful and easy to use.

DaFont.com

DaFont.com is a website with thousands of interesting fonts in which you can download for free. It's organised and easy to find an ideal font for which you're looking for. As our artist has a fun brand image, it supplied us with multiple fonts that fit this image, it was also easy to download them and move them to be used on InDesign. DaFont made our project more successful, because if we used a standard Microsoft font, it would look unprofessional and like no effort had been put into making it and conforming to the chosen brand image of the artist.

Photoshop
I used photoshop when altering and editing the photos for our print work. Also it turned out successful in cutting the background off the image and making it fit on the album without the green background in which it originally had. However, i found Photoshop difficult to use, it was time consuming getting used to using this programme. However, once i got used to how it worked, i managed to alter the pictures quickly and successfully. In this, i manipulated images by making them brighter and cutting off the backgrounds to insert the American flag. This hardware was used successfully, and helped us strive towards a better final product.





Final Cut.

Final Cut is a programme in which you arrange the timeline, cut, order and edit footage which is in your video. Final Cut is an easy and simple programme to use, i didn't use it last year but picked up how to use it quickly. It was very time consuming editing all our footage, chroma keying was definitely the hardest part of our project and took the most time, but without it our video would not have all the locations that we got from Google images, like the American Flag, Mcdonalds and different places in America. It was easy to organise all our footage and cut the parts off which we didn't want. The hardest part of editing was definitely getting the lip-syncing to match the music. We also have to use final cut in question 1 of our evaluation, the directors commentary. By the end, i learned how to use this quickly and simply and it was a big contributer to our final product.



Evaluation.


The main website we used for evaluation purposes was CreateaGraph.com, this helped is organise our questionnaire findings. It made them easy to understand, simpler and clearer and also made them look more attractive with colourful charts. Adding a little more colour to our blog. The website is easy to use and also quick.




Other technologies we used in the evaluation stage i have already previously mentioned, including:
Powerpoint, for creating slideshows.
Word: For creating our questionnaire.
Final Cut; For constructing question one.
Google: For collecting relevant images for this wall post.
And Blogger.com: For presenting our evaluation on.