Google Docs and Slides were useful for collaboration during research and planning. During production, a Nikon D3200 camera was used to shoot video and photos after learning camera skills in sessions. Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro were used to create marketing materials and edit video, with skills developed through tutorials. Prezi and Google Slides presented evaluations creatively and allowed remote work.

1. Most useful software’s/program’s/equipment during research & planning, production and
evaluation stages explained
Pre-Production-Research & Planning
During pre-production at A2 I used a much wider range of programs to present my research
and planning findings such as Google Docs, Slides, ThingLink, YouTube and Prezi. This was
mainly due to me having a much bigger amount of work to present them in a creative and
unique way. One main program that helped me a lot was Google slides and docs this was
due to the giving me the ability to share my work with my group members so even if we
weren't in the same room for example both working from home we were able to still work
together and both contribute to the project on the same document. Furthermore, it is also
accessible fromanywhere this enabled us to pick where we wanted to work at college or at
home even in another country, another advantage to it being accessible fromanywhere is I
didn't have to save the work on a memory stick or take time to email it to myself so due to
this it made more organized as I knew where all the documents would be kept so the
benefit to this is it enabled us to be more efficient with the time we had and did not waste
valuable time we had.
Production
During A2 stages of production we used a Nikon D3200 to shoot our video on and take
images for our website and digipak. Compared to our AS work we felt this time we knew
how to use the camera with more skill and knowledge compared to last year this was due to
skill sessions set in place by the college, on them sessions they allowed us to understand
what setting to have in place to get the best shot for example if you are wanting a close up
set the camera to aperture this allowed us to take detailed close ups compared to in the
past where we only had the camera settings on automatic. Furthermore, we also now knew
how to change things like shutter speed this enabled us to manually adjust the focus so we
could then manipulate depth of field this then enabled our video to have a wider variety of
shot types and helped to make the video become more interesting. Also by being able to
manipulate the features on the camera it helped us reach some of our stylistic goals that the
genre required after doing research on the forms and conventions of a pop rock video. A
piece of software that helped create our products was Adobe program’s such as Premier Pro
and Photoshop. Firstly, Photoshop was used to create our digipak we were not new to this
as we used it for our AS magazine but our skills were very limited and only consisted of only
knowing how to cut around an image, how to use text and to adjust the brightness and
contrast of images. To be able to improve my Photoshop skills I viewed a variety of YouTube
tutorials to enable to me to gain more knowledge on the software in order to make my
digipak better. These skills consisted of firstly HDR toning this allowed me to increase the
tone and exposure of an image this resulted in the images looking clearer and a lot more
detailed, another skill was the spot healing brush this allowed me to make my main star
look more like a artist and make the photo look cleaner and more confident this brush tool
eliminated any spots, marks or blemishes the image had. Another skill I found through my
research was the transform tool it is very basic but this essentially allowed me to change the
size/position of the image this was useful as I could turn an image on its side and add 3
photos over the top to create a collage for the digipak. And the final skill I will discuss is
image adjustments these allowed me to do things such as brightness, contrast, exposure,
colour balance and even add filters the exposure and brightness helped a lot to create an

2. optimistic/calm vibe so by increasing the brightness slightly and lowering the exposure I was
able to do this. Another important piece of software we used in production was Adobe
Premiere Pro we used this to edit and put our video together we were new to this software
so we had to do a slight bit of research and playing around as such with it. Through basic
tutorials we were able to gain a understanding of the basics things like how to cut a video in
half this was very important for us as we were able to delete the parts of the shot we didn't
want or didn’t look good, another skill we learnt through research was the effects tool this
tab has all kinds of tools in from brightness to adding a colour filter, 2 effects we used was
adding brightness to our shots as due to the weather it was quite dark and gloomy but
through adding this it created more of a positive vibe. And another important tool was the
stabilize tool this enabled our shaky shots to be more stable and look more professional
without using added equipment.
Evaluation Stage
I used a variety of programs/software’s to present my evaluation questions such as Prezi
and Google Slides. Prezi enabled me to present them with more of a creative feel to it and
enabled me to add transitions and colour to my work by using these it would add variety to
it. Whilst Google Slides is just easy to use like I mentioned during pre-production I am able
to use it anywhere so it allowed compatibility and was more efficient rather than using
Microsoft PowerPoint especially due to me not having that on the laptop at home.