Q4

1. Bethany Smith
Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the course of my media work, I used a variety of different technologies
throughout each different stage of production. The first thing that we were
required to do was create our own blog where we could post all of the
progress we were making with our each of our products. There were a number
of posts, which all fit under each of the headings; research, planning,
production, drafting, production diaries and final products. Our blogs were
created on ‘Wordpress’ which is a graphic interface, something which I
enjoyed working on and found quite straight forward to navigate and
continuously post. In comparison to ‘Blogger’ which was the software we have
previously used, it was a lot easier to use and making menus and listing new
posts was far simpler. Wordpress was a lot more powerful and efficient,
allowing for a lot of flexibility and is a lot more advanced in comparison to
Blogger. I think that by moving all of my blog work onto Wordpress enabled
me to be more successful in this aspect as overall it was a better, more
efficient blog which let me achieve a professional and successful blog. This is
something I valued as the whole blog was a very important part of our
production and played a big part in tracking progress specifically through the
research, planning and evaluation stages.
My blog on Wordpress currently has over fifty posts which detail my progress,
from my initial thoughts and first ideas up until the final versions of all of my
products. I ensured that I used a variety of presentation platforms, one of my
preferred platforms was a podcast app, where I recorded my voice and the
uploaded the recording onto YouTube. I did this technique of blog post for
Audience theory and when discussing the representation of media in relation
to real life examples. I really liked this type of presentation as I felt I learnt
more about the topic at hand as I actually had to talk about it and put the
information I collated into my own words. I think that this method helped me
to understand what I was researching better and helped me to remember the
information.
On top of this, during the production of my music video I used a fair amount
of physical equipment as opposed to the constant use of software. All filming
was done on a Canon 550D; this includes all raw footage, time lapse and
production diaries. This particular camera is a digital SLR and I found that
using this type of camera proved to have a lot more advantages in
comparison to analogue cameras where you are required to edit all footage
on the camera itself. I have had previous experience with this particular
camera before and so I found all filming fairly straight forward to fulfil.
Another advantage of using this camera was that the quality of all of the

2. Bethany Smith
footage was very high. Filming on this camera also allowed me to zoom and
alter the focus of the lens how I saw fit.
Overall, I used a variety of different media technologies over the duration of
my production and found all of them fitting to the tasks that I was required to
do. I think that I found these media technologies the most valuable in the
actual construction of each product as well as editing the final stages.