Evaluation question 4 for A-Level Media

1. Evaluation Question 4
How did you use media technologies in the research, planning,
construction and evaluation stages.

2. Research and Planning

3. Blogger
• We mainly used blogger as a place to display all of the
research and planning. Blogger allows upload of pictures
and the embedding of different types of multimedia
sources. Blogger also allowed us to edit the posts, so if
ideas have changed or developed we can edit the post to
show the developments. Blogger also is very accessible
so we can compare our work to those of another year and
see what we need to add or improve.

4. Slideshare
• I used Slideshare to display word documents on blogger.
Slideshare gives us the ability to work offline in Word or
PowerPoint and use the massive amount of features in
those two programs and then display the documents on
our blog via embedding. Slideshare was most useful for
shooting schedules, risk assessments and shot lists.

5. Prezi
• Prezi was the main web application we used. It allows the
creation of massive PowerPoint-like slideshows. Prezi
allows importation of photos, YouTube videos,
powerpoints and music. The finished Prezi can then be
embedded on the Blogger by ease. I used Prezi as the
backbone of the coursework, all the intense and large
pieces of the coursework such as Music video, digipak
and album cover conventions.

6. Word and Pages
• I used Microsoft Word and Pages for the shooting
schedule, risk assessment and shot list. It allowed me to
display the information in organised tables. The finished
Word documents can be uploaded to slideshare to be
embedded on Blogger. This really help use keep the key
information organised so I could make sense of it when I
filmed

7. Google
• Google was our main place for research. We used it to
find examples of digipaks and Magazine adverts. We also
used it to find other students blogs and their music videos
during our Student analysis presentation. It was very
helpful in the long run because of the large amount of
content available for use you learn from and gain ideas.

8. YouTube
• Google was our main place for research. We used it to
find examples of digipaks and Magazine adverts. We also
used it to find other students blogs and their music videos
during our Student analysis presentation. It was very
helpful in the long run because of the large amount of
content available for use you learn from and gain ideas.

9. Bauer Media
• Bauer Media was a website that wasn't used a lot because
it is very specific toward informing you about different
media brands. However, it was use a lot in the target
audience research. Its simple presentation of information
allow a clear understanding of the audience that each
brand serves and gave us relevant information on the sort
of media brand that could aid us in our audience appeal

10. UK Tribes
• UK Tribes was a very helpful and informative website
that gave information regarding youth trends and also
some of the issues relevant now. This allowed me to gain
an insight into how music affects the youth of today and
also allowed us to correct some of our target audience
mistakes by looking at some of their youth research.

11. Construction

12. Sony Movie Studio
• The main work-horse in the coursework was
Sony Movie Studio. It was the place where the
music video was edited and rendered. Sony has
a lot of feature bundled with the Movie Studio
package. Some of these feature really helped
bring our music video to life. One of the effects
we used a lot was to speed up the movie clip,
this allowed us to present a large section of
time in reality in a small amount of time. Movie
Studio is very versatile, it allows the
importation of many file types and supports 5-
channel surround sound input. Overall Movie
studio made the editing task very easy with lots
of features and function very centred to the
main timeline. One downfall for Movie Studio
was the complicated rendering options which
really hindered a lot of members of my class.

13. Effects
• We mainly used fades in our music video to
transition between our video clips. Effects
were not used heavily on the video to make
it look natural. Some effect we did use a
radial blur effects on some pieces of footage
to make it a bit more interesting. The
opacity was tweaked so allow overlay of 2
different clips

14. Sony Sound Forge
• This piece of software was not used that
much in the construction of the music
video. However it did come in handy when
we found that the audio track for the song
was very quiet. Sound Forge allowed the
boosting of volume in the tract without
resulting distortion. This helped keep the
song as loud as possible with sound bad.

15. Panasonic HC-X920
Camcorder
• The main piece of technology that could make or break the music
video was the Camcorder. The one I was given was one of the
newer ones that the Media department had. It allowed us to record
in a compressed 1080p resolution which offer crisp detail which
would aid our music video in appeal. It was easy to set up and
transport however, the battery life was a bit of an issue.

16. Smart-phone's
• The ease of taking photos with smart-phone's made producing
editing and filming updates very easy and not very time-
consuming. Once they photos had been taken they could easily be
emailed or physically transferred to blogger to record our work.

17. Photoshop
• During the ancillary task, Photoshop was used heavily to
construct the album cover and the magazine advert. The large
variety of features available made editing the raw images and
positioning them very easy. We had a lot of effect to play and
experiment with. Some of the effects we found were pointless but
some we though would compliment the images nicely.

18. Effects
• The main effects used was shadows, this helped to make
the album look grungy. The ease of use of Photoshop and
layout of the icons made accessing the features easy. The
contour effect made the image look sharp. The ability to
layer photos also allowed use to use multiple photos and
stitch them together with easy

19. Evaluation

20. PowerPoint
• PowerPoint was very helpful for the evaluation questions.
I found that its easy of use and ability to organise
different bits of information into different slides very
helpful in making the information clearly laid out. The
finished PowerPoint could then be uploaded to slideshare
and then embedded onto blogger which is a good way to
display the finished piece of work

21. Prezi
• Due to the massive amounts of information that is needed
on some of the evaluation question, Prezi was once again
a very reliable and feature rich source, it has a nearly
limitless size to one presentation so it can hold massive
amounts of text, images and videos and can be organised
by assigning each textbox or picture with a path, which
helps overall navigation through the presentation.

22. Snipping Tool/Screenshot
• The snipping tool is a key tool in the coursework, it
allows a quick and easy way to copy large amounts of
text and photos to put on presentations, word documents
or blog posts. They came in handy when I had to
document the editing process as evidenced for blogger.
Without this tool, screenshot-ing would be a long time-
consuming process.

23. Conclusion
• Overall, this technology I have described above has really
been helpful throughout the coursework. It has allowed
easy reproduction of screenshots, an area with lots of
functions to edit our video and a place to easily store blog
posts. I think that the editing suit that was used was one
of the most important pieces of technology that was used.
It was a program that I spent hours using and due to its
user-friendly appearance and organised GUI, it made that
time really enjoyable.