1. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning
and evaluation stages?
During the project I had to become familiar with a range of different technologies some
which I had never used before for example Final Cut express. I found learning about new
technologies interesting and gained a variety of different skills along the way.
Throughout research and planning we mainly used basic software’s such as prezi to present
our work this is a software I have used before during AS and found it worked really well.
However we also created a range of short videos as we found this was a fun way to display
our work we mainly used iMovie to edit these as it was quick and easy to do and a software
that we had all used before, as well as this it also provides basic templates to dress the clips
to make our videos look more fun and professional. We used iMovie a lot for example we
created video on sticky notes of our story board as well as our focus group we also created
short videos discussing our ideas.
As well as actually editing the videos it also developed my camera skills something that I
would be thankful for throughout the construction phase of the project when shooting the
actual music video. I learnt how to set up the camera and how to utilize the different tools
the camera provides to get a ray of different shots.
A technology that had a massive impact on our work was social networking sites for example
Facebook as a group we created a Facebook group called “Eclipse Media” on this site we
posted our ongoing designs and prototypes where we then were able to gather feedback
from our target audience instantly, posting our designs on our group allowed us to display
our work to a wider group of people allowing us to reach out to more people where they
could then comment on our work which we then used to either improve or keep the designs
we created.
The main software that was introduced during the construction of the music video was Final
Cut express this is an a lot more advanced software than iMovie and allows you to edit
footage in more detail for example adding more transitions, more in depth cropping as well
as colour correcting footage. The main tools that played a key role in the level of editing we
accomplished was down to the transitions tool this allowed us to use professional looking
effects such as the corss dissoolve this dissolved two clips together suitle. As well as this we
also used the colour correcting tool where we found a more warm colouring effect to add to
all our clips, this linked to how we wanted to represent our artist as warm and loving.
Another software which was highly used was Photoshop this was used to create our digipak
and music advert posters. I feel that I had quite a strong knowledge on this software as I had
used it previously . I feel this software has a good set of tools which were really benficial in
creating my digipak and advert. Tools such as the burn and blur tool really allowed me to
edit the images so they stood out and gave a more professional look. As well as this I also
enjoyed the fact that on Photoshop you are able to layer the images this is something I took
advantage of and blended images and backgrounds together to create the best images I
possible could.

2. Final Cut Express
Below represents one of the skills I learnt using Final Cut Express this is how we inserted
cross dissolves into our music video, I really like this effect as I felt it was suitle and gave a
professional look to our music video.
Step 1#
Insert clips and render each
of them (cmd+r) to then add
an effect to the both clips
click in between both of them
until a purple line appears.
Step 2# Next click the effects bar
at the top, there should then be a
“Video Transitions” option as
shown in the image to the side
hover over this then hover over
the “dissolve” option. Lastly click
on the “cross dissolve” option.
Step 3#
The effect should appear like this
when inserted,