1. Media evaluation
How did you use media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?
Throughout the various stages I used various technologies to
help with construction, research, planning and evaluation.
This was done to assist me in completing the tasks set.
During the Construction stage which involved creating the
music video, digi-pack and poster as a group we used
different media technologies to help construct a more
accurate and realistic product in comparison to real media
products already existing.
For the hardware that we used during the recording ot the
video included a camera, tripod and the san disk to transfer
the files. (Cannon SLR 600D) We used these to help us shoot
the video and to take pictures for the digi-pack. Many of us
also didn’t know how to use the cameras very well and we
were taught how to overcome this by the media technician
who helped show us how to alter the frame rate, exposure
and other details to give us a better image. Due to our initial
set of footage they were recorded in different settings as we
had little knowledge of the cameras, but in the editing stage I
edited the different footages so they looked closed as
possible. We used mobile phones to communicate and meet
up with each other on the day so that we were well organised.
We also did this in case problems appeared such as actors
not being able to make it to the music video shoot. After the
footage was taken on the camera we took it to the college
Macs (Another piece of hardware that we used) they were
mac book pro’s and then we used the video editing software
Premiere Pro CS6 to edit our footage. Using a combination of
this hardware and software enabled us to create a music
video of high professional quality as if it were a real media

2. product. The editing enabled us to avoid any mistakes in the
footage, edit the lighting so that the narrative looked better
and also so that the clips taken in different settings looked
more similar so that the music video ran more smoothly. The
editing process took a long time and was mainly done
between me and one other person in the group whereby we
would take turns to tediously make the video more interesting
in the hope to gain more audience feeling engaged within the
video. The editing process also allowed us to add
conventions from the genre we were focused on such as
dipping to black. This is allowed us to make a non-linear
narrative by moving the clips around. For the digi-pack and
poster we used Adobe Photoshop CS6 to edit the drawings
that Kayleigh did and to also edit our photographs into the
digi-pack. This allowed us to edit in layers, use multiple tools
and also give a professional look to reflect a real media
product. Eddie (a member in the group) also used a Graphics
Tablet to go over the individual lines for the poster design.
When uploading the coursework that I had completed I used
Blogger to keep a track of all the work that I had done. I had
previous experience using blogger due to using it in my first
year in college. I had learnt form last year and deiceded to
make my blog more presentable by making it suit the genre
that we were covering for the coursework. I decided to use
the logo from the band in combination with the use of dark

3. colours to straight away give the impression of what the
genre is going to be about. I also did this for consistency, as
images, videos and anything else media related which was
being uploaded would be based around this genre.
I decided to use various ways in which to upload to blogger,
first by just using the features that are already supplied on the
blogger site such as text posts, images posts etc. and
formatted this so that it fit within the theme. I then decided to
show extensive use of technology by uploading pdfs, screen
shots of word documents and also the use of PowerPoint. To
upload these presentations I used Slide Share, from using
this I could then embed the videos onto blogger giving a more
overall professional look.
When gathering information to know what people would want
or expect included in a music video of the specific genre we
used a free site called “Survey Monkey” whereby you can
make surveys for free, send them to people and have your
results put into graphs ready for analysis which I have done in
my analysis section. I have used Survey Monkey in the past
but this time I varied the questions used to get more in depth
answers, therefore by changing to these different question
types I think we got more accurate results then when I first
used Survey Monkey. We found this much easier and simpler
than using paper based surveys and also interviews. But we
did want to vary our technology and the way in which we
gather information so we also recorded an interview which we

4. then uploaded to YouTube. The interview was filmed with the
same camera and we also received quite good feedback. But
we have learnt to pick mature candidates for the interview as
sometimes this can cause problems. We used YouTube as
our main format of presenting videos that we had recorded
including our final submission, from this we learnt how to add
tags, change descriptions and share the video directly from
YouTube so that we could get more feedback from our
audience. YouTube also acted as a great source of music
videos as most companies and record labels upload their
videos to YouTube to be watched. We used this to our
advantage by studying music videos within the genre and
finding out conventions that we didn’t know about. It was also
very good for music video analysis. This taught me that there
are various ways to gather information that you are looking
for and to use different ways to gather information as you can
gain more accurate and reliable Information.
In terms of using communications technology we used
phones, social networking and instant messaging to stay in
touch. To begin with we were solelydepending on phones,
but this proved difficult after having to forward texts or have
the same conversation 3 times so that the whole group would
know. It was also not good to be dependent on phones as we
may have ran out of battery, not have it on us or simply have

5. no signal. After this we decided that social networking sites
such as Facebook would be a good idea to use. We used this
due to its instant messaging group chat that we could create
which led to discussions and made us able to organise dates
and times for production. We also used social networking
sites for feedback as we realised family and friends would do
this if you posted it onto Facebook. Making our video
available throughout various ways allowed us to gather more
feedback from the audience to improve.