1. 4. How did you use media technologies in construction and research, planning and evaluation
stages?
Throughout this project, I and my group have used a variety of media technologies to simplify the
research production and evaluation stages as well as using the media technologies to produce the
best final promotional package. Throughout the project we used a large variety of new media
technologies. "New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the later part of the 20th
century to encompass the amalgamation of traditional media such as film, images, music, spoken
and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology,
computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet." They have become
common within today's postmodern society and with that we have taken advantage of them in the
construction, research and planning and evaluation stages of the project.
Research and Planning
In the research and planning stage we each individually used forms of new media where we would
be able to showcase our journey through each of the stages. Ideally, we believed that using the
Google-owned blogging platform ‘Blogger’ also known as ‘BlogSpot’ to record our process and
journey through the entire task, from shooting the music video, editing and creating promotional
packages. This platform has been beneficial, as it has enabled me to personally keep a record of all
my research that I was able to find for future references, in addition to help assist pace myself with
the planning and production work. Using Blogger was very easy and straightforward for me to
use/feature my work, this is due to the reason that I already own a personal Blogger in which I am
indeed confident to use and manage. Again, blogger enabled me to work from anywhere where
internet was accessible, for example my iPhone, this allowed me comprehend that it’s the perfect
example of a new media which has enabled ease of use where I can keep a record of my production
journey, monitoring and planning. Also on my blogger featured a production schedule which was
also beneficial within my journey.
The Internet is another huge part of the research and planning stage, I used it extensively to find
out information on codes and conventions, on different technologies I was going to use, which
locations which is appropriate to film. Using search engines such as Google encouraged me to search
about thing related to my project. It has been helpful in helping with in the project and once again
this is an ideal example of new media technologies and ease of use. I also used the Internet to access
Moodle created by my college (Leyton Sixth Form College). This was extremely beneficial as this is
where I was able to access and download important documents, like for example the recces and the
talent release form templates.
Other sources of online media also contributed to the planning like for example Google which was
one of the main primary online search engines, simply because it is the one that I am confident in
using which produces relevant and reliable results. By using keywords associated with I and my
group’s main theme, we were each able to discover a great deal of online content that contributed
towards our research and planning.
The social media site Youtube has been helpful in both the research and planning stages. It gave me
the opportunity to look at professional music videos in more detail. The site also aided me along the
way allowing me to upload my own videos of the focus groups and our official music video.

2. When my team and I began the planning and production, it was clear that my group started to
become quite reliant on media technologies. We used Microsoft’s word processing program ‘Word’
to draft and write up our original narrative for what will appear in the music video, before turning it
into a story board which was later hand drawn by one member in the group. Using Microsoft Word
was not a challenge at all, seeing as I it’s a programme in which I use on a daily basis.
Within the Internet we created a web survey using ‘Survey Monkey in order to gain additional
feedback (which was helpful in research, planning and the construction plus the evaluation stage).
Survey Monkey was a great way to gain feedback because it was accessible to everyone allowing our
responses to be varied.
The website (Blogger) allowed me to feature links which was accessible to everyone where they will
be able to complete an online survey which I had personally created through an online survey
named ‘Survey Monkey’, the feedback featured on the survey has allowed my teachers and peers to
offer my group and I instant feedback on the final print products and music video. Using an online
survey was not the only beneficial technique that I and my group used to gain feedback, we had also
used the college’s HD cam recorder to capture footage of our peers feeding back from our ideas that
we pitched to them.
Construction
When it came to the stages of filming/producing and editing the music video, I personally suggested
that it would be most suitable to use one member (Symone) of the group’s Cannon 600D DSLR
camera to film with, the quality of these cameras are fantastic and are able to achieve a better result
than the camera that we had used to film our progress group. The cannon camera had a variety of
settings as well as including features of where the aperture and shutter speed can be altered. My
experience with being able to use the DSLR camera was good seeing as I am an A2 photography
student. Not only did we use the camera to capture the moving images for the music video but we
also used the camera to capture photographs (stills) of behind the scenes and the images that we
included for the front of our digital packaging and inside insert.
It was important that we used a tripod to make sure that the camera is still as well as the footage.
Most of our lighting was natural, and we tried to plan out our filming so that we got the best lighting
possible during the day. However, we did use artificial lighting during the photshoot for the digital
packaging. This enabled us to get a variety of good lighting so that our images are good.
In order to create the promotional packaging to a level that I and my group were satisfied with, we
did ensured that we carried out a reasonable amount of research into real existing media products
so that we can develop our understanding of our target audience and draw inspiration. We used a
variety of software to present this; one of the most important tools that was used for the entire
packaging was Adobe’s Photoshop CS5.1, which was mainly used to sharpen the images (saturate)
and insert text like for example the title of the song and name of the artist, in addition to adjusting
the sizes of font (typography). My experience with using Photoshop was a good experience although
I don’t use it regularly, it was challenging but also fun.

3. One of the programmes we were able to use was Final Cut Pro created by Apple using the iMacs
provided by my college. This programme was used to edit our footage, as it enabled us to add effects
for example, slow/fast cutting rates (speed), transitions and fades. It also allowed us to edit the
colour of our video from colour to monochrome, however there were still elements of colour.