Question 4 of Evaluation: How did you use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Blogger

The blog format, which we used for our practical coursework, was called ‘Blogger.’ It helped me to build and create my ideas and plan them in a very organised manor, as I was regularly and frequently updating and posting on my blog. I found the blog an extreme

assistance as I could just easily post my ideas and concepts. The fact that the blog was online really was an advantage as a large percentage of my practical work was to do with planning my ideas and researching conventions of my music video and ancillary texts.

Photoshop

Another media technology, which helped me during my practical coursework, was ‘Photoshop.’ This was a program I used to edit my digipak and advert therefore it was incredibly important for my ancillary texts. I found Photoshop very difficult to use at first, but I seemed to get used to using it. During the practice lessons before we started our

digipaks and adverts, was when I found it the hardest as I had never used Photoshop before. I was not familiar with the different tools that you could use on Photoshop such as the editing of pictures and images you put on there. You can turn up and down the brightness and contrast; making it stand out more, make it black and white etc. Another thing I learnt was about the different layers on a document. These layers allowed me to put different texts/ images on top of other items. Below is the layout of Photoshop, which I had to learn to use:

Final Cut Express

Furthermore another technology I used when planning and constructing my music video was ‘Final Cut Express.’ This is the program I used to edit my music video and I have used it once before in AS Media Studies when making our film openings, so I was very familiarised with this program. The only difference when using Final Cut this year, was the fact we used it to lip sync the artist’s singing in the song to our shots and music video. I found this part of the editing particularly hard, however my group and I discovered that one of our group members was very acquainted to editing and lip syncing, therefore she did the

majority of the editing. Nevertheless my other group member and I still did some of the work, but just the smaller parts prior to the task and the easier parts of the editing. Moreover, when one of my group members or both were not in for the lesson, I did do some of the editing myself. I found it a lot easier than last year as I knew what I was doing this time and I was far more imaginative than last year as I put a number of transitions in such as; dissolves and fade in to fade outs. Since my group and I had so much footage I was able to easily get rid of the bad parts or the parts that we did not want to use, so the process was quicker and more effective.

Below is a screenshot of the layout of Final Cut Express:

Hotmail

Hotmail was a very significant Internet based technology, which my group and I used. This was one of the reasons why my group and I could choose the song we did for our music video. We e-mailed the manager of Gabrielle Aplin asking for permission to use her song ‘Please Don’t Say You Love Me,’ after our other unknown artist that we were going to use cancelled on us and said she did not have time to be in our music video. We easily overcame this problem when we got a reply from her manager saying that it would be a pleasure to allow us to use the song.

YouTube

YouTube was vital to the planning and researching process as well. This is because it was very useful and beneficial when I was looking up music videos and how they had been

edited and structured. Additionally YouTube was one of the reasons as to why my group and I chose the artist we did. The artist we used ‘Gabrielle Aplin,’ was an unknown artist at the time, however she was Internet famous through YouTube.