2. 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.
3. • 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.
4. 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.
5. The audio is separated here so that it
can be louder on the shots that read
out the questions
6. 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
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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
10. 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.
