Nikon camera was used to film music video footage and take photos for album cover and advert. Skills with manual camera settings like aperture were developed. Prezi software was used for evaluation and was found to be more engaging than PowerPoint. Adobe Premiere was initially difficult to use but skills were developed, like editing clips to match song beat. Photoshop skills from photography course helped manipulate images. Facebook, blogger, soundcloud, and slideshare were utilized at various stages for communication, presentation, and embedding media.

1. Question 4: how did you use media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

2. I used a Nikon camera throughout the most part of my coursework, in selected clips
with filming the music video footage as well as taking the main image for my album
cover and magazine advert page. On both occasions I developed my skills in using
the manual settings of the camera, like controlling the aperture to suit different
lighting conditions; for example, for my ancillaries the main images were taken
during the solar eclipse this year, because of the extremely bright light coming from
the eclipse I used an extremely high aperture of f/22, meaning the lens hole was
extremely small to let in as little light as possible, because of this the image gives the
appearance of a much darker sky and so could be confused with night, however it
was taken in broad daylight, even brighter than usual, I feel this effect gives more
drama to the image and for this reason I would consider the image to be a great
success; not only this but I also took the image on a rather high shutter speed and so
luckily, when the bird flew across the sky I managed to capture the bird in full flight
across the eclipse moon. Though this may be very much down to chance, I feel there
was a slight bit of skill involved and for that I am proud. Because I used an old 50mm
prime lens to take my ancillary images, there was no auto focus, and so because of
this the control of focus and aperture was completely down to me adjusting the lens
manually, this is something I have learned to do over this year of the course and
have eventually gotten used to, however I saw it as a great difficulty at first; another
thing that was difficult, during the filming process of our video footage, was working
with the constant different changes in lighting conditions, for example, a bright but
cloudy day, artificial LED lighting, a dim bowling alley and a dark winters night at a
firework display, all of which we had to adjust out skills and knowledge of the
camera to the correct aperture for the amount of light, as the auto setting didn’t
give a good enough appearance in their colours in our opinion.

3. I used Prezi during the evaluation process of this project for question 2; as I hadn’t
used this free piece of online software since this time last year I was a little rusty and
it took me a while to remember how to use all of the features successfully. After I had
gotten the hang of it however I was reminded of what an enjoyable piece of software
it is; its greatly more interesting to use and to view than PowerPoint as you are not
restricted to a square box and can travel on a journey so to speak through images and
text, I find it a lot easier to retain information this way as well, as it is against the
conventional and also enjoyable. It is also great because you can add it to your blog in
a few easy steps, simply by copying the embed code and pasting it in the HTML
section when uploading a new post and it is there on your blog to use and interact
with without leaving the blog site; which is very helpful unlike having to use slide
share to convert a PowerPoint or word document into a viewable and interactive
format and it also makes the blog look nicer and better put together.

4. This year in the course was the first time I had used Adobe Premiere, and
at first I found it extremely hard to use as there is so many different tools
and effects that can be added to the clips. After a few tutorials and help
from my tutor I got the hang of it and whatever I didn’t know how to do, I
could search it online or ask for help, for example we wanted to add clips
taken in landscape on our I phone's, however when we added them to
adobe they would play in vertical with a black screen filling the spaces
around the clip, everybody in our group had their go at trying to flip the
clip and when we asked the media technician Chris to help us he fixed it in
a matter of seconds. Another thing that took a while to get the hang of
was editing the clips to the beat of the song, and watching the movement
of us in the clips and trying to match them to the song as well, I think we
all found this quite difficult when editing the clips. What I did find easy
however was editing the colour of the clips by adjusting the RGB curves,
Brightness/contrast and RGB levels, this is because I am used to using
these tools on Photoshop in my photography course, as I understand what
the tools mean and how the image behaves when each colour is adjusted.

5. As I am familiar with Photoshop as a program because of last years
coursework project as well as my photography course, I found it
rather easy to edit and manipulate my images to look the way I
wanted them too by using curves, brightness and contrast, exposure,
and a gradient map to create a blue hue in my ancillary main image I
found it gave it a moodier and mysterious look to it, as well as make it
more interesting to the audience and so more likely to grab their
attention and have them remember the image. However one thing I
did find quite difficult was the downloading of fonts from Dafont.com
as it was quite a difficult process with administration permission etc. I
also managed to manipulate my own handwriting on Photoshop
which was something I hadn't done before, to add to the back of my
digipak.

6. During the Market research stages of the project, Facebook proved a
very useful social networking site. I was able to create a survey on
Surveymonkey.com and then send it to various people I knew via
Facebook messenger so they could fill it in for me and then receive the
results, all in one day on the same machine, which makes it so much
easier than if I were to hand out a survey on paper. As well as this, later
on in the course when our draft edit for the music video was
completed, we could create a closed focus group with our friends and
classmates so they could watch the embedded video clip on the group
and comment what they liked and what they thought we could improve
upon without leaving the closed focus group on Facebook.com. It also
proved to be useful throughout the entire project so that we could
communicate as a working group with a group message, to arrange
times and locations of when we would film, send each other shared
information and images, as well as discuss the direction of the project in
general, which was very helpful really.

7. Throughout the entire coursework projects for the Media studies
course we have used blogger.com to present all of our work, from the
early stages of planning and research to the final product. It proves to
be an extremely handy way of presenting for the moderator and our
teacher as he can regularly check our blogs and mark what we have
done from his computer. It also makes it a lot easier for us as students
because we can do the work whether it be editing or written research,
on the computer, and then almost immediately present it on the blog,
all on the same machine. It’s a great use of technological convergence
and proves how much easier it can make what otherwise would be
quite difficult and painstaking tasks. Presenting the work this way is also
a lot greener as we are saving copious amounts of paper and print outs
by having everything saved and presented technologically. What I
especially like about blogger is that everything can be tagged into
specific groups of the stages in the project, so that they are all
presented on the same page, even if they were uploaded at different
times, which makes it a lot easier to navigate around the work.

8. I used sound cloud to present my evaluation question 1 response. It is
extremely easy to use and upload sound clips; I recorded my voiced
answer through the sound cloud app on my mobile phone, which I then
uploaded once I edited out some of the bloopers on the app. Once it
was uploaded to my sound cloud account I could then access the
recording on my laptop via the website and copy the embed link to my
blogger HTML upload box. It was all an extremely eased process and I
find much easier and more interesting than simply typing my response
to the question out. My only issue with the sound cloud recording was
that you cant have visual images to explain your point further, and so I
had to later add images and captions to support my answer on blogger.
But I do appreciate the ease of linking one piece of technology and
another (my laptop and my phone) with an app, it takes away the hassle
of emailing the recording and changing over the formats and then
further finding a way to convert the recording to a format that can be
played through blogger, again this media platform makes difficult tasks
enjoyable and easy.

9. Slide share is a piece of online software that has helped me on so many
occasions throughout this years and last years project. You can simply
upload a PowerPoint presentation or Microsoft word file onto the
website database from your computer files and it will convert them into
a presentation that can be embedded onto blogger, then presented in
an interactive way with the blog audience without them having to leave
the blog website. Its seriously a great program and I would recommend
to anyone. I have used this software with all of my written pieces of
analysis and research throughout the project, with images presented
too. It makes the blog that bit more presentable, interactive and
interesting for the viewers.

10. This year in my project I used my apple I phone regularly throughout
the project; to take photos for test locations, share information with my
project partners, record clips that we used in the final edit for the music
video and even to record my own voice to answer an evaluation
question. Incorporating another piece of technology like my phone with
the computer s I was working on may have been difficult and time
staking some time ago but now it actually makes the process of working
easier and faster with the use of email, apps and internet I was able to
share files from my phone to the computer I was working on hassle and
cable free. The camera of the smart phone has also improved greatly in
recent years and for this reason it wasn’t so hard to use phone clips in
our final edit, but because of their light weight and small size they are
much easier to film mobily on, with auto focus and aperture you can
focus more on what you are filming rather than how bright the clip is
turning out or whether it is in focus for example. We also wanted to use
phone clips to break the fourth wall between the video and the
audience and show that this is real and un staged, that we were filming
ourselves having fun.

11. Youtube.com has been the easiest and only way we know of
uploading a video online to present and share, after editing our draft
edit and final edit on adobe premiere, we were able to render the file
and upload it to Youtube.com; from there we could share the file to
face book, where our focus group could watch and comment upon it
to give us feedback, we could also use the embed code and upload it
to our blog in a couple of moments, where it could be presented and
watched on my blog without the viewer having to leave the page. We
could also watch it regularly ourselves to evaluate, screenshot from
and look for improvements to be made without having to open adobe
and watch from there. YouTube has proved to be an easy platform for
us to use to share our main product and draft edit with other people
and the rest of the internet.

12. This entire Media studies coursework project thrives and succeeds because of
technological convergence, without it every aspect of the project would be
unnecessarily difficult, take a lot longer to produce and present work and
overall would be a lot less entertaining for all involved. It really is quite
amazing how technology has advanced so far in recent years and we can now;
edit, create, analyse, evaluate, research, document, record, upload and
present all of our work on the same machine. Because of the internet and the
age of web 2 this whole process is made possible and technology has become
a form of a creative platform and outlet, where we can share our creations
and ideas with the world in one click of a button, amazing.