The document discusses how new media technologies were used at various stages of a project. Blogger was used to organize research and allow easy access from different locations. SlideShare was used to upload presentations. Google and YouTube provided a wide range of examples for researching conventions in music videos, posters, and album covers within the chosen genre of indie/rock. Adobe Premier Elements was used to edit video footage and add effects to create the final music video. Photoshop allowed editing of images and application of tools to design the album cover and poster. Various technologies played an important role in planning, research, and construction of the final products.

1. Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research,
planning and evaluation stages?
The use of blogger.com was very useful in organising and showcasing my Research
and Planning, primarily because it allowed me to keep my research on the computer,
rather than having to print it out. It also allowed for easier access from both home
and college, via any internet connection, which was very useful when doing work
outside of college. The online nature of the blogs also allowed me to make instant
updates that were neat and tidy. Although there were some occasional issues in
accessing my blog at college due to technical problems, the blogs were a more
organised and efficient method of gathering my research and culminating my overall
coursework.
SlideShare played a very important part in bringing our blog together as it allowed us
to upload presentations of research and planning which was needed as part of the
course.
The Internet was very useful while researching conventions to use within my final
products as well as examples of successfully existing music videos, posters, and
digipaks to give me the ideas I needed to create ours ourselves. I found the most
common internet tools I used were YouTube and Google. They allowed me to access
a broad range of examples, including ones from different genres as well as the genre
of my choice. While this was very useful when researching posters and digipak
covers as Google provided clear image of examples, it was even more useful when
researching existing music videos. YouTube allowed me easy access to a wide range
of material, which I could then watch and analyse for example some existing Indie
music videos to research and gain an idea of what I will need in my video. It also
hosted a lot of unconventional music that would not be shown in the charts, and
may have required a lot of researching to find, this was very helpful as the genre we
had chosen was indie/rock which isn't really found in the update chart programmes.
I was also able to find suggestions for conventions to research, which I would have
had difficulty finding another way. This made my research much easier, as I could
focus on analysing the genre of my choice and the music videos from this genre,
rather than looking for ones that I didn’t need. However the internet research was
hindered by in-school internet filtering which was sometimes a pain, but I was still
able to access it outside of school and could easily save links or relocate videos if my
research was interrupted. Therefore, the internet was a major part in my research
and planning, despite minor technical disruptions.
After all research and planning was complete we could then begin constructing our
final products we also required a use of a lot of technology. Before bringing our
music video together we first had to record the footage, which we did by using video
cameras provided to us by the school, this allowed us to record all the footage we
needed to create the music video, we had to use the camera to its full potential as
we had to make sure we had a number of different angles within our final piece this
meant using some of the cameras features for example the zoom button for long or
close up shots. Once all of our footage was collected we then had to bring it all

2. together as well as editing it to make sure it successfully fitted the genre of our
choice. We did this by using a programme called Adobe Premier Elements, which is a
video creating/editing programme. It contained many features which allowed us to
edit our video to how we wanted, for example we made sure all the cuts were
extremely fast as this was found to be a typical convention of the indie/rock genre.
We were also able to add a black and white shaking effect to our video to give it that
indie, urban and gritty nature to it. Adobe premier was also used to create parts of
our evaluation, questions 3 as this involved us feeding back to the examiner about
how the audience feedback we gained helped us create our final products. Once
again we needed to use the program to its full, as we needed to edit the footage we
gathered, using the video camera to do so to how we wanted and to make sure it
flowed easy and made sense.
Photoshop was another important programme we used to construct our final pieces
but it wasn’t in the making of our video but our digipak instead. It allowed us to style
and edit existing images and images we collected ourselves to suit the genre we had
chosen, this process was made easier Photoshop as it has many different tools and
options which allowed us to make a few designs before settling for the one we
thought would be the most successful in appealing to intended audience. Some tools
we used included the ‘magic eraser’ which allowed us to perfectly cut around an
image and keep parts we wanted, deleting the rest this made it much faster process
in bringing our album cover and poster together. Another tool we used was the
fading option tool, this was very important in creating our digipak as it was needed
to blend an image with an effect allowing us to create a link between all three of our
final products, shown to be a typical convention for the music industry.