The document discusses various websites and applications that were used for research and creating media products for a coursework project. Blogger was used to document work through blog posts that could embed videos, images, and presentations. YouTube was a source for inspiration videos, and to post the group's final music video. Google Images provided photos for mood boards and to analyze digipaks. Spotify was used for music research and finding songs. ThingLink and Prezi created interactive analyses and presentations. Slideshare hosted presentations on the blog. Photoshop and Final Cut Pro were used to create and edit the advert and digipak, while iMovie created supplementary videos.

1. Websites and Applications

2. Blogger
The first media technology that has been
extremely useful in documenting all of my
work has been Blogger. It was also vital to
present my research in a format that was
suitable for lots of different research types,
like interviews and questionnaires. The site
is run by Google and is a free site in which
you can post time-stamped entries. This
resource has been ideal for embedding
different items through HTML codes, like
videos from YouTube, thinglinks (which will
be explained later in the presentation) and
prezis. This tool has ensured that I can
really easily display all of my work that I
produced externally from this source.
Blogger is also easily accessible, easy to
read, and easy to navigate around.

3. YouTube
This website was one of the key areas of my secondary
research. It is practically the most obvious place to look for
things like music videos to analyse and gain inspiration
from, to looking at videos explaining how to use different
tools on Final Cut Pro and Photoshop. The site itself is a
video hosting service which now streams videos from
external sources like Vevo. Vevo’s videos were extremely
useful as they post music videos and obviously this was
highly important for my coursework. Not only did we look to
YouTube for inspiration, my group and I posted our own
videos and the final music video onto the forum, allowing
for easy viewing, and allowing us to link our video easily for
public sharing and promotion. With over 1 trillion views a
day, it is incredibly popular, meaning that we will definitely
find some sort of way of gaining views and a wider
audience. Other videos that I have posted on my channel
have been screen-recordings of editing different digipak
and advert drafts, along with audience feedback and
others alike. With the embedding and HTML codes, I could
post the videos to my blog very easily.

4. Google Images
Google Images may be a given
website for research, however it was
extremely useful for different aspects
like my mood-boards and finding
different digipaks and adverts that I
could analyse. The large variety of
results that come up when you
search certain items is incredibly
convenient to find more than one
image of the same criteria at the
same time. Once I found the images
I wanted, I either posted them in a
collage on a document, or straight
onto my blog to present in a post. It
is extremely convenient and an
obvious choice for image searching.

5. Spotify
Spotify proved immensely useful when it came to
finding the actual song to base our coursework
around, and also for secondary research
involving the popularity of certain genres, artist
and songs. The app is a Swedish music
streaming service in which you can browse
different artists, albums, genres, playlists and
record labels. You can also create and share
individual and personal playlists. Furthermore,
Spotify provides access to over 30 million songs,
which is a figure that is continually being added
to daily. You can pay for a subscription with this
service, and as of June 2016, Spotify has 100
million monthly active users. With these features,
it was the perfect place for my group and I to look
for different songs and variations of songs (in
terms of covers, acoustic versions and remixes
of different popular songs) for the use in our final
media product.

6. ohdaughter.com
This is the website of Daughter
(our artist). This proved very
helpful in finding information
about the artist, and working out
their style of work. We frequently
came back to this website for
research, and comparing our
work to the conventions of the
actual artist. From this website we
saw how ‘stripped-back’ it was
and how easy it was to use and
navigate around. This led us to
consider a minimalist theme for
our media products.

7. ThingLink
This utility really helped me with my
research and analysis of digipaks and
adverts, as it allowed me to create a
sort of interactive analysis. The
website’s actual defined purpose is to
allow photos and other images to be
made into web links, mainly for the
purpose of advertising and education.
When you hover your cursor over
certain areas of the image, it reveals
captions in which you can explain
certain aspects that you believe imply
different things. This is a really easy
way to display ideas and can easily be
posted to my blog through the
embedding mechanism and HTML
code.

8. Prezi
Prezi is a further method that I used to
display my research, as well as
analysis’s and evaluation. The website
creates a presentation, much like
Microsoft PowerPoint (PP), so it is
perfect for presenting different areas of
research and ideas. However, it is a lot
more appealing and interesting than PP
as the presentations are a lot more
visual, with a map-like schematic
overview which allows viewers to pan
over different points and zoom in on the
main points of interest. Due to this eye-
catching interactivity, I used it to create
analysis’s like of the music video for
Sia’s ‘The Greatest’. The outcome of
creating one of these presentations is
unique to itself and customisable.

9. Slideshare
Slideshare has allowed me to paste my
presentations created on PowerPoint to
my blog in a format that is easily
readable. This ‘Web 2.0-based slide
hosting service’ allows for different files
from PowerPoint, to PDF and Keynote
to be uploaded and formatted in a way
much like on a PowerPoint
presentation. The website has been
said to be ‘similar to YouTube but for
slideshows’. This utility has been really
key in my research and evaluation in
the production of my group’s
coursework. I shall even use it to upload
this slideshow to my blog. You can
upload slideshares to blogs using the
embedding tools.

10. Adobe Photoshop
This is an essential tool that has been extremely
pivotal to the creation of our advert and digipak.
Photoshop has allowed for our images to be
perfected, colour-corrected, layered, and
generated to create a digipak, insert and advert.
The different tools in Photoshop involve creating
layers of editing over an image that you can
remove at your desire, spot correctors, blur tools,
and the simple abilities to add or remove colour
and create a monochrome image. This app is a
subscription that you download to your laptop or
computer, and costs £8.99 a month. Photoshop,
as I wrote before, has been essential, and all of
my drafting was created on there. Our final
pieces were saved on Photoshop and were
created just by using Photoshop – without it, I
don’t think our final pieces would be as
professional-looking.

11. Final Cut Pro
Again, Final Cut Pro was an app that we
used as a group to format our final
piece. It was absolutely essential in
creating different features like layering
different footage over each other,
creating smooth transitions and layering
text over the top. Final Cut features
different tools like filters and transitions,
along with titles and colour correction
that have all been utilised throughout
our production. To gain portable access
to Final Cut Pro, we downloaded a
month’s free trial as opposed to paying
approximately £300 for exactly the
same tools, with the only difference
being that you had it to keep. Being
practical, we only needed it for a month
so we downloaded it for free.

12. iMovie
iMovie wasn’t used for the editing of
the final video as we knew that it
didn’t have all of the same tools as
Final Cut Pro does, and we wanted
the freedom to do whatever we
wanted with our video. Instead, I
have used this app (that comes free
on all Mac products) to create
audience feedback and behind-the-
scenes videos and to make fast-
forward videos of digipak and advert
drafts. It has been especially
convenient and easy to use for parts
of my blog that require good content,
with editing that isn’t necessarily
spectacular.