1. How did you use media
technologies in the
construction and
research, planning and
evaluation stages?
2. Magazine and DVD Covers: Survey Monkey:
I used the search engines on internet browsers to research This is a website that I used to
and analyse similar magazine and DVD covers to help me. create and share questionnaires
Doing this helped me to understand what conventions were with people through my blog and
used within this genre of product and what I had to do when it social networking sites. Doing
came to creating my own covers. I embedded the images onto this made it simple for me to
my blog and made detailed analysis on each that I found. gather results and find out what I
needed to know about my target
audience.
Technologies
within my
research
Here is an example of one
of the analysis’ that
Microsoft Excel: I used Microsoft excel to display the results that I found from my surveys through
graphs. I did this so that myself and others, could easily see the results that I had gathered. Having
them in a graph format made the construction of my focus group a lot easier, as I was able to take a
quick look at the graphs and see the results.
3. Using the internet within my research
I used various websites to enable the best possible research. I used sites such as facebook.com,
youtube.com and twitter.com, also I used the blogging site, blogger.com, to upload and share all of my
research. I used YouTube to collect research on opening sequences to similar products, such as “The Suite
Life of Zack and Cody”. I watched the videos, embedded them onto my blog and then analysed the videos
based on the conventions used, settings, sound etc. This gave me a very strong knowledge of what I would
need to use within my own opening sequence. I used Facebook and twitter to get feedback for my
questionnaires that I created. This was a simple and effective way of collecting results as millions of
people log onto both sites each and every day. I posted a link to my questionnaire on my facebook wall
and asked people to do it for me. I used blogger throughout my research to post all of my analysis’ and
the results of my research. The blog was extremely good to use. It worked really well and was good for my
specific needs. It embeds videos and uploads photos simply and effectively. It’s easy to navigate around
and to collect response's on my work. Without the internet I
believe I would have found it a lot harder to collect the
information that I did, as I would have had to found old
DVD’s and magazines from various places, and I would
have found it difficult to keep all of my work in a good
order.
4. Technologies used within my planning
In my planning I created a story board via I used Paint within my planning in many
Microsoft Word. I created a table that gave me different ways. I used it to help create my draft
enough space to hand draw the pictures in and colour schemes for the DVD covers and my
gave me room to describe the shot types I will magazine covers. I used paint to help to crop
be using. I used Word because it is very simple some of the pictures that I used within my
to create a graph on this programme. I also used planning to make them fit into the areas I
Microsoft Word to create draft fonts for my wanted them. By using Paint I was able to save
ancillary tasks. I used these are there are a wide the file as a jpeg. file
range of fonts on the programme and I also used
this to make the draft work for my magazine in
my ancillary task work.
5. Technologies used within my construction
Throughout the construction of my filming I used a tripod for the camera . Doing so made sure
that all of the filming looked more professional as they camera wasn’t shacking, and all the
shots were to a high standard. The group I worked within and myself found that this piece of
technology really helped with the overall outcome of our final audio-visual piece.
For the filming of our piece, we used Sony video recorders. These camera’s were very
small and easy to use, with high quality pictures. They also had the ability to take still
photos, which my group needed to complete our task, therefore it saved us some time
when it came to constructing our piece. The camera was easy to use when it came to
uploading to a computer and it did everything that we needed it to do.
I uploaded my audio-visual piece to Apple MacBook's. Before this course, I had never used one and
found them very difficult at first, but after a short while I found them just as easy to use as any other
laptop. The MacBook had all the programmes I needed to complete my coursework to the standard I
wanted and was very useful when it came to editing our piece.
6. Technologies used within my construction
For the fonts of my ancillary tasks, I used a website called Dafont. This website had many
different variations of school/child like fonts, which made my work more relatable to the
audience. Without this site I would have had to use one of the default fonts from Word or
Word Art, which would have meant that my fonts would not have been such a high standard.
The site was easy to use and copying and pasting the fonts into my own work was simple too.
The final piece of technology used was iMovie. This is an editing programme that was already on
the MacBook’s. It was very simple to open our piece of audio-visual work and to start editing on
straight away. Using this we were able to make a good final product thanks to our editing we did
on this programme.
8. Microsoft PowerPoint
I chose this for my evaluation as it was a simple,
yet fun way for me to present it. Having all the
animations and being able to include images
makes PowerPoint presentations more than just a
long read.
Prezi
I had never used Prezi before but I found
that using this site for my evaluation has
made it less dull and less text based. The
site allows you to create text and images and
lets you put the focus on different pieces of
information at a time. I found it fun to use
and very worthwhile towards my work.
Survey Monkey
Using survey monkey, I was able to find out what
people thought of my final product with one simple
and easy questionnaire. I found this site was very
good at getting feedback on my work and that it
gives you to opportunity to ask any questions you
wish, therefore it was very relevant.
