Throughout the production process, various media technologies were used for research, planning, construction, and evaluation. SurveyMonkey and Facebook were utilized to create and distribute surveys to gather audience insights. Blogs served as an online space to collectively plan and track changes. Photoshop was used to design promotional materials, and online tutorials helped expand skills. A Sony camera was used to film the music video for its stability and quality. Final Cut Pro on Apple computers allowed for video editing. SlideShare facilitated sharing files online when internet access was limited. Overall, new media technologies proved vital at every stage of production.

1. How did you use media technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the various production stages, I used many different media
technologies, both hardware and software. I also gained experience and skill
through using them.
In the research stage of production, for many of the questionnaires I created to
gain insight into the target audience, I used SurveyMonkey, a free online survey
website which is the “global leader in
online surveys. ” SurveyMonkey is
commonly used by market researchers and social scientists alike, and their
customer base includes such industry giants as Samsung and Facebook.
Using SurveyMonkey was an easy and quick way to
create simple surveys with the option of including
pictures.
I put the links to the surveys onto Facebook and also
onto my blog to collect responses. Unsurprisingly,
Facebook was the most successful form of data
collection. Given Facebook’s particular appeal to the
age range of our target audience, it was an appropriate
sample for our research questions.
YouTube was also a useful tool in relation to the research stage as
it provides statistics
about the audience of each video,
which is useful when comparing
and researching similar artists.

2. During the planning stage, we needed to make sure that all
the information we gathered and decisions we made were
collected into one place. Our blogs served us well for this.
They were very useful and ensured that we all knew what was going on and
could keep up to date in relation to things such as the shoot for the video as the
plan kept changing for the date/location etc. Using an online blog also meant
that I could access my work at college and at home without the need for any
memory sticks or external hard drives to carry around.
I used Photoshop extensively in the construction stage
when it came to my digipak and magazine advert as it is
a good design tool. I already had some skill with
Photoshop from my Photography A Level course, but it
was mainly just editing colour, contrast, exposure etc.
So I searched google for some simple tutorials and by
creating my digipak and advert designs using
Photoshop, I was able to develop my skills with aspects
of the software that I had not used previously.
After I had looked through the fonts and brushes that come with
Photoshop I decided that I needed some different ones, so I
found two websites: dafont.com and brusheezy.com which
provide free fonts and Photoshop
brushes for download.
The music video was shot using a Sony
HVR-HD1000E (left), which was chosen
over an HD Sony
mini DV camcorder
(right) due to its
superiority in both
hand-held stability
and recording quality
During the editing stage, we used Final Cut Pro on an
iMac. This was the first time I had used Final Cut or an
Apple computer, so at first it was quite difficult to
adjust from being used to Windows and I was sceptical
of Apple products, but now I would say that I prefer
Macs as they are easier to use once you know how.

3. In Final Cut Pro, we used some of the effects such as black and
white in order to enhance our video. We did come into some
problems when editing as our clips were being stored on the
college server and had to be reconnected every time we opened it
up which was quite an annoyance especially if we forgot exactly
which folder they were stored in.
In all stages of production, but especially in the
evaluation, I used a website called SlideShare to
upload documents onto the internet so I could put
them on my blog. This website was a huge help as it meant that I did not have
to rely on having internet access to complete a piece of work – I could do it in
an OpenOffice document and upload it later instead of just doing it as a normal
blog post. This has been especially important over the past few months while
we've been having some serious problems with the internet at home.
In summary, new media technologies were vitally important in all production
stages. They allowed us to gain information from the target audience using
websites such as SurveyMonkey and Facebook, gave us the ability to easily
plan and group work together on Blogger and, of course, were essential in the
editing work on Final Cut Pro on the iMacs.