How did you use digital technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

1. EVALUATION
QUESTION 4
How did you use digital
technologies in the construction,
research, planning and evaluation
stages?

2. TECHNOLOGIES USED
 Photoshop
 InDesign
 Bridge
 Audacity
 Word
 PowerPoint
 Blogger
 SlideShare
 SurveyMonkey
 Facebook/YouTube/Vimeo
 iMovie
 Camera equipment
 iPhone 7 Camera, 5s Sound Recorder
 Google
 SoundCloud
 Premiere

3. AUDIENCE RESEARCH AND
FEEDBACK: SURVEYMONKEY
 We used SurveyMonkey throughout the research and evaluation
stages of our project to ask our audience a series of questions
regarding the development of our three products.
 Before production began, we conducted a survey on our target
audience to see what they thought about similar products, informing
our choices about what we should include in ours
 After production, we conducted another survey to see what the wider
audience thought about our production.
 This site served us as a quick and simple way of gathering a large
amount of information from a wide audience. It was not as in-depth
as conducting individual interviews, but took minimal effort on our
part, except for making the survey and sharing it on our various
social media pages.
 The results gathered are presented in a very easily analysable layout
which helped our production evaluation immensely

4. RESEARCH - MICROSOFT OFFICE
The Microsoft Office suite has provided me with a consistent and clear way of presenting all of my research and
evaluative work for the following reasons:
 It is easy to share files between group members: as students we all get access to a free copy of Office so
each team member could easily view the work of another if we sent them it through our Facebook group chat
 Neater and simpler editing than paper work: the regimented presentation of these programs makes our work
look professional and formats automatically upon editing i.e. we can change the work as much as we like and
the fonts adapt to properly fit the page. Regular fonts are clear and easier to read than handwriting, making it
simpler to share ideas between team members and easier to look back upon
 Easy to include common fonts etc. from production work: Office fonts are shared with the Adobe suite, so once
a font is downloaded it is avaliable in both types of program. This was useful for making documents such as
our stylesheets and preliminary plans.
 Files can be backed up and hosted online: The ability to instantly copy and distribute our files to each other
has been immensely useful. We have had to revert to backups a few times when we have lost access to the
most recent versions of work, which would simply not be possible with physical media. The fact that these
backups can be hosted from any computer with an internet connection (using a program like Google Docs)
has allowed us remote access to our work out of hours.
 The same documents can be printed multiple times if needed for multiple people e.g. we each needed a copy
of the exact same shooting schedule during production, and instead of having to rewrite the same document
four times, it could just be printed again. This has helped us to avoid inconsistencies through human error and
sped up the production process

5. PROJECT PRESENTATION:
BLOGGER
 Blogger is, believe it or not, an online blogging service where we have been able to create
personal blogs free of charge upon which to demonstrate all different aspects of our work.
 Blogger’s HTML post construction allows the embedding of all sorts of different media forms,
including text, audio, video, PDF and image presentation.
 The various other websites we have used throughout our project (YouTube, SlideShare,
SoundCloud etc.) each provide an “embed code” for the work we have hosted on them.
Blogger has the capability to take all of these codes and use them to neatly and concisely
present all formats of work upon one webpage.
 Had we not access to a service like Blogger, our work would have to be viewed across about
half a dozen different websites, and countless webpages therein. This would have been
inconvenient both for us (in knowing which copies of work we had uploaded to where) and for
our examiners (they would have to be provided with a linksheet and go trawling through all
these different websites to find our work).
 Blogger’s chronological presentation and customisable layouts have allowed us to keep track
of which work we have and haven’t finished throughout the project, and presents it in a logical
order conducive to the creative process.

6. POWERPOINT/PDF PRESENTATION:
SLIDESHARE
 SlideShare is an online service designed for the hosting and
subsequent embedding of PowerPoint presentations, PDF files
and images. It has served us as a common platform upon which
we have been able to present our PowerPoint and word
documents, as well as any files we could not host elsewhere as
they can always be saved as a PDF and hosted here.
 SlideShare’s embed format allows entire presentations to be
clicked through without having to leave our blogs. This makes it
incredibly convenient to view a large amount of information on
one page, which has made our project’s presentation far more
concise and easily consumable than it would have been on paper.

7. PHOTO MANAGEMENT:
ADOBE BRIDGE
 Adobe Bridge is a program which allows the professional
management and organisation of captured images. We used it to
spool through all the shots from our advert/digipak shoots and
select those we wanted to use for our final products.
 This was not a complex job, but Bridge made the selection
process clearer as we could compare all of our images side by
side without having to print them all out. This saved hassle and
time and meant that we could view the photos in full digital quality,
as opposed to “the best the printer could do”.

8. SOCIAL MEDIA
 Social media has served several purposes throughout our project:
 Research: We have been able to view our band’s social media pages to
gather information and images about them and the fans that follow such
pages. We have seen conventions of the way that the band promote
themselves, and of how fans react to different kinds of media presented on
such sites.
 Communication: We have communicated quickly and efficiently with each
other, the band and our audience through these sites. They have allowed us
to present some of our audience research methods (primarily SurveyMonkey
survey links) to the audience
 Feedback: Messages and comments from these sites have given us direct
feedback from audience members about our different products e.g. people
commenting on our final video link with their advice and ideas

9. AUDACITY
 Audacity is a free program designed for all sorts of audio editing. We
used it to manipulate our group discussion audio before uploading it
to SoundCloud.
 We could preview, edit and rebalance the audio so our final upload
focused only on productive conversation and avoided any
interruptions we experienced. The normalisation feature was most
useful as it brought both quiet and loud parts of the conversation to a
regular, audible level.
 The edits we performed using Audacity made our research far more
concise and professional, which in turn made it easier for us to utilise
in the production stage of our project.
 We also used Audacity to trim down the audio of our chosen song so
that it fit perfectly with our video.

10. AUDIO PRESENTATION/RESEARCH:
SOUNDCLOUD
 SoundCloud is a free site used mainly by small-time producers to
host audio files, usually in the form of music or podcasts.
 Faux Pas actually host most of their music on here, so it was
useful to listen to what the band have produced and this was
actually how we chose to use their song “Not So Sad”.
 We used the site also to host recordings of our group discussions
throughout the project. Its simple layout and online access meant
that any of us could quickly listen to any of these recordings from
anywhere with an Internet connection if we needed to do so in the
other stages of our project.

11. FILMING/PHOTOGRAPHY:
DLSR CAMERA (CANON 600D)
 Though the final shots we used for the digipak and magazine advert were captured on film, we
took a digital camera to the shoot as a backup as we had no idea how well the film would
develop. We were lucky to get some great shots, but we did a full digital shoot just in case they
didn’t “come out right”.
 For photography, the digital camera was fantastic as we could shoot as much as we liked
without having to run out of film. The photos we took were easy to import and manage on our
computers, and we could copy them to each other, share them over social media etc. very
easily so we could all utilise them at the same time. This would not have been possible with a
film camera.
 We also shot the first version of our music video on this camera. It was incredibly easy to use
with its automatic or manual settings and focus options. The only trouble was that the battery
had an extremely short lifespan. The video we shot was of fantastic quality and was easy to
import and edit in a multitude of programs, but we made practical human errors such as
excessive camera shake that made much of the footage unusable. We were quite glad to have
the chance to reshoot our video so that we could correct these errors with proper tripod usage,
light metering and using the stabilisation feature included on the camera. The digital screen
helped us to frame, review, approve and manage our shots on the day while the in-built
microphone (and later external microphone we attached) provided acceptable quality diegetic
sound for the video.

12. IPHONE 7
 During shooting of the second version of our music video, our DLSR camera actually stopped
working thanks to a software error and we opted to use an iPhone 7 instead. This is an
example of how digital technology, however brilliant and intelligent it may seem, can often fall
flat in reliability when compared to manual film methods. We did not have access to a “real”
film camera, but we would not have chosen to use one thanks to how much more ergonomic
and intuitive the digital camera was.
 The iPhone was not match up perfectly to the clarity of the DSLR camera (as expected), but its
wider aspect ratio, HDR exposure management and automatic stabilisation actually provided
much more “natural” looking shots. Some audience members were surprised to find the video
was all shot on a phone, and we agree with them that it still looks to be of a professional level
of quality. Had we a higher grade DSLR/lens combination, we would have made an explicit
effort to get it working but with our timescale and practical needs, there was too little a
difference between using the 600D and the iPhone to change our minds.
 The iPhone’s user-friendly software made it even easier to import our video through iTunes
and onto a computer than the DSLR’s SD card did. The files also came in a filetype directly
compatible with Premiere Pro which made the editing process even easier than before.
 We also used this phone to record the audio of our group discussions. This was easy to import
into Audacity, edit and upload to SoundCloud. Again, thanks to the iPhone’s user friendly
interface.

13. DIGITAL SCANNER/PRINTER
 Because all of our work is presented online, we used a digital
scanner to document any written work we conducted. These
usually took the form of notes but our hand-drawn storyboard was
also scanned in this way.
 The film prints we received from the development lab were
scanned so that we could edit the film photos into our magazine
advert and digipak. Without this capability, the other elements of
the project would have had to have been printed out and
physically attached to the printed image.

14. ADVERT/DIGIPAK COMPOSITION:
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP
 Photoshop has been used in the creation of our magazine advert and
digipak, as well as one or two odd jobs regarding the presentation of our
other work (simple cropping and rearrangement of research images)
 Without a tool like Photoshop, our advert and digipak would have been put
together by hand after printing each individual element. We would have had
to layer all our images, graphics and text from their respective programs upon
a digital scanner and our final product would be one “scan” of this.
 Details of its use are presented specifically in an attached document, but
Photoshop has essentially allowed us to virtually test all different
arrangements, colour schemes and ideas of both products without actually
making them. We have been able to save drafts from all different stages of
production that we could revert back to when required.
 Photoshop’s simple and intuitive layout has allowed all members of our group
to contribute to editing. The practical skills required to do the same things by
hand would be much harder for us all to learn, so this “intuition” has sped up
production and avoided loss of quality through human error, poor printing or
lack of resources.

15. IMOVIE
 iMovie was not used for the main music video editing, but we
utilised it to put together our research interview videos. It was
useful to flip the visuals and modulate audio of the videos we
studied so as not to be detected by copyright filters, to add
subtitles for the points we covered and to combine relevant clips
together.
 iMovie is not as developed as Premiere Pro which is why we did
not use it to edit the final product. It is, however, complex enough
to quickly put together simple clips. It is far easier than previous
years where film would have to be manually cut together and
subtitles be printed onto their rolls. This sped up the research
presentation process and allowed for fewer total films to be made,
streamlining the analysis stages of production.

16. ADOBE PREMIERE PRO
 Adobe Premiere Pro is the program we used to edit the final cut of
our music video together with. It allows both audio and video
editing through a very intuitive and ergonomic interface that all
members of our group could gain experience from using.
 Its most useful feature was undoubtedly the ability to view video
and audio as separate elements in a project. This allowed us to
match the cutting rhythm to the beat of the song when we wanted
to, and view logically at which point in the song our video was to
fit.
 Premiere allows non-chronological editing, meaning that we could
keep going over the video, making minor tweaks to timings and
visual adjustments again and again until we had our desired
product just how we wanted it.

17. YOUTUBE/VIMEO
 YouTube and Vimeo are both free online video hosting/sharing sites.
We used them to upload our audience research interviews, feedback
interviews and final music video.
 YouTube was also useful for viewing our band’s existing video media
to get a feel for what we should be creating, and was used to look at
other existing music videos from bigger names during research
 The reason we had to use Vimeo to host our research videos is that
YouTube has strict copyright policies and plagiarism detection
software, which removed our video when we tried to upload our edits
of existing videos. It is interesting that digital technology can detect
such non-profit uses of other media like this. I would consider this a
downside as it made our production process more convoluted, but it
is an essential feature used to prevent people making money from ad
revenue of other people’s work.