Media evaluationQuestion Four

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

By Charlie Gilbert

Internet / Blogger• In the production stage of our video we have used various technologies

to help us complete the work and have discovered benefits. But also some disadvantages.

• One major technology used was the internet, especially Blogger where we uploaded our plans and work, this helps us to organise the work better and see everything we need in one place, however a drawback of this is sometimes the site may not be working and files may corrupt.

Wordle/Slideshare/Scibd• We also used Wordle to organise and present an attractive list of

locations to film. The locations were placed in various colours, the advantage of this is it makes a simple list look much better.

• Scibd was also useful to upload word documents onto the blog for our final evaluation, it made the documents look more presentable and professional.

• Dafont was also used to download some fonts for our digipak, we downloaded these of the website and then used Photoshop to complete the album.

• Slideshare was also useful to do power points or to analyse the digipaks or adverts and to easily view them in one click. Another web site we used was YouTube to research and get ideas from other music videos, this proved useful as we could view many different types of videos.

Mobile Phones/Digital Cameras

• What also proved useful was a mobile phone, we used a mobile to play the song we was doing so the actor cold lip sing and emotionally connect to the song better, this proved a useful tool. We also downloaded a tube map for a mobile so we could plan our journey on the go.

• The digital stills camera was also handy to have, we used this to take photos for the blog and for the digipak and produced a better quality photo, having a digital camera is useful as you can make sure you have the right shot straight away as you can view it on a screen.

Editing/Photoshop

• Without the digital editing and final cut it would have been difficult to produce a good video, this proved useful as we could cut and change clips and add effects to our video.

• Photoshop was helpful into creating our digipak, and proved easy to use, we could use different layers to create a unique image using various forms of colouring.

• A digital audio recorder (dictaphone) came in useful when we did our directors commentary, we just recorded what we were saying and simply uploaded it.

Photoshop

• Photoshop was extremely useful to us whilst making the digipak, we found it fairly easy to use and the outcome looks professional. The image on the right illustrates the amount of layers we placed on the picture to receive the final outcome.

Final Cut Express• With Final Cut Express we could add effects and make the video look

professional. With such features on Final Cut we decided to make use of them, and to improve the appearance of the video. Below are some images of the colour correction and cross dissolves used in our video.

Cinematography • To film the music video we used the Sony HD video cameras that our

school supplied.

• We were familiar with the camera as we have used them in previous projects, however we discovered some new tricks such as opening the lens to have a blurred focus effect, however a disadvantage of these was that the battery didn’t last long.

Apple Macs

• To edit the music video and to do our work, we used a Apple Imac, overall they were reliable for us and allowed us to do all our work on them such as updating the blogs and doing the digipak.