4. How did you use media technologies in the research, planning, contruction and evaluation stages?

Research and planning

Social Networks

 When carrying out research I found websites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and artist’s websites and record labels extremely helpful in gathering information for my work.

YouTube was particularly helpful because this is where I could research into the codes and conventions used by both modern day and old metal style bands, the videos shown helped me build up and understanding of what it was that I needed to include within my texts and without it I think that I would have been a lot harder to get an understanding of what metal bands conform to, not only this but without it I wouldn’t of been able to watch videos by the artists under my genre.

As well as this, when researching into ancillary texts social networking sites such as Facebook and twitter where indeed very helpful because this is the new free way to promote artists on a global scale and many artists are becoming increasingly popular because of it,  these sort of websites offered me with tour posters, album covers, links to videos on YouTube, and finally images of the band so that I had a better idea of just how I could use the mise en scene of my chosen filming location to my advantage and because its free  I found that this was the most common source of information I used in my planning and research purely because it offered me with so much free information that really helped me when researching and planning into my products.

Furthermore because this use of technology has helped my personal band and many friends bands promote their products I felt that it was a really appropriate way of doing research because I already knew what to expect and where to find the information making my research a lot easier than I thought it would be.

Web 2.0

Google was a really effective source of Web 2.0 because it is a well trusted source of information that gives you endless amounts of information for free, and because it is such a large company it is well trusted and one of the largest internet search engines in the world making it trusted and reliable.

Furthermore because it now owns YouTube it was increasingly useful because it gave me links to videos related to the subject and this helped me find a lot more out about the bands within my genre because there where many ‘about the artists’ videos where it explained what equipment they used, how they dressed and what their music videos where about.

Nikon camera

My Nikon D3100 came in very useful when getting my focus group because this was the tool used to film peoples thoughts and ideas on the questions I had to ask them as part of my audience research and although it didn’t pick up the sound as well as I had planned the image quality was good and it contributed towards the development of my products.

Construction & evaluation

Nikon camera

 This is my camera that I chose to film the video with alongside my tripod, it is the D3100 model and has a 70mm – 300mm lens attached to it giving me a really good zoom if I needed it in any of my shots which I did a lot of the time, as well as this it also has a variety of different modes so if there was poor lighting in the room I could switch it to a better mode that would be better suited to that light, also the lens has a manual or automatic focus so if there was little light and the camera had trouble focusing I could switch it to manual mode or if I wanted to create some shots out of focus that went into a focused shot I could easily do this and it proved very effective in some of the shots used within my video and overall the camera was very reliable and has never let me down in any situation.

Ancillary texts

camera

When creating both the CD case and the magazine poster i used my Nikon camera  in order to create images for drafts and eventually the final product,  i think that Photoshop was probably the best option in this case because i know how to use it due to previously being a photography student so i had an advantage over some of the other students which i used to benefit, when shooting the painted hand photos i used two spot lights in a way that i would get a slight shadow on the hands and once i had positioned them correctly i took images from different angles however i only ended up using one or two of the images taken because in my opinion they were the strongest and looked better than the other once they had been edited on Photoshop moreover when taking my landscape photos i had used a tripod because I wanted all my images the same level therefore i used the built in spirit level to achieve this and the outcomes were up to my expectations, i set the camera to automatic as well as having the landscape setting on the top of the camera which adjusted the settings to capture the image at the best of the camera’s capabilities.

Photoshop

Once on Photoshop i carried out many drafts both with the landscape images and with the abstract images before finally coming to the conclusion that they would look better combined, to do this i used tools such as; levels (this balances out the colours within the image), opacity (if there is more than one image or two that want to be blended), crop (to cut pieces of images out), blur (to blur text or images), layers (so that everything is layered), contrast (how well something stands out), brightness (how light or dark the image is), paint bucket (adding colour to parts of the image), black & white, and quick selection (helps remove parts of the image) all of which helped my achieve my final products both on my poster and on my CD case and without it I wouldn’t of been able to create them to a high standard.

Final Cut Pro

final cut is the software used to edit my video, it has both blue and green segments each representing a different thing, the green being my chosen song and/or the muted tracks from my shots and the blue being all of the shots themselves stitched together to create my video, above it is the timing of the video and where about in the video each clips is.

on this image we can see all of my shots in the top of the image which is where they are stored until i chose to use them or not, there is a yellow marker that you can drag over the duration of the clip that you want to use which is really useful because there is no limit to how long or short your shot can be which came in really handy when creating my video.

Here is the effects section, you can have transitions, layered effects such as black and white like i used, and many others, I personally didnt use many because it didnt fall under my genre conventions however it was a really useful piece of technology to have at hand in case i did need it for whatever reason.

This is the viewing section where you can stop, pause, fast forward or even rewind your video and this came in handy because there where times where i needed to re-watch certain parts of the video and as well as this you can also make it full screen to view your video easier and analyse it in more detail.

over all Final Cut Pro is a very easy piece of software to use and it much preffered using that over the editing suites that I have used in the past because they are far more user friendly, however i did have an issue uploading the video to YouTube and this took me several hours before i was able to do so, but other than that it was extremely handy and helped me a lot during the editing process.