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

1. EVALUATION QUESTION 4: HOW DID
YOU USE NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN
THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH,
PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?
BY ROB HUNT

2. TUMBLR
 Tumblr is the main focus point for my media coursework. It is the home of my blog which is what I
upload all of my research about theorist and the music industry too. I post all of my planning onto here
including my storyboards too and also it is what I use to show all of my evaluation questions on. Tumblr
is a social media platform where people can upload their photos, videos and it also allows you to view
blog post of people that have similar interests. This was very useful as you could exchange ideas with
likeminded people and they would give you feedback in the comments section so that you can improve
as the year goes on. Tumblr makes it really easy to embed links to websites like Prezi, Slideshare and
YouTube meaning that I could upload work that I made on other platforms on Tumblr and have all my
coursework in one place so that it makes it easy to mark. Because Tumblr made this so easy I was able
to complete all three stages of my coursework in time and too a good standard. Tumblr is good for
coursework as it clearly shows how people improve over the year and how they become more
competent with it. Tumblr’s text sections allows me to explain all of my posts and answering all the
questions meaning my blog is full of detail. A difficulty of Tumblr is that I found was when writing blog
posts it was hard to move photos and videos around the post and I ended up with photos in places
where I didn’t want them.

3. DSLR 2300 CAMERA
• The camera we used was a Nikon D3200 as it is a high quality camera, with a very high resolution and
was able to film in HD, this enabled us to film in the best quality possible. Also the camera was very light
which helped us when we had to hand hold the camera which we did a lot in our music video. We were
lucky enough to use two different lenses in the making of our music video, the first lens in the basic one
that come with the camera. This has a 18-55mm zoom, however, the second lens was an 35mm lens
which was able to widen and narrow the point of focus on a specific point and able to blur out the the
surroundings. This lens had a 1-1.8 aperture, this aloud us to easily vary our shots and we could
demonstrate our skills and get a wide range of shots from close-ups to long shots with a deep depth of
field. We had a few difficulties when filming with batteries on the cameras as we found that some of
the batteries were drained within an hour, so to overcome this problem we bought two more fully
charged batteries along with us to make sure we could get as much filming done as possible. We were
much more experienced compared to when we were filming in year 12 which meant the quality of our
shot improved and we were able to hand hold the camera whilst keeping it steady which made a drastic
improvement.

4. ADOBE PREMIER PRO
• Adobe premiere pro was one of the most important aspects to the making of our music video. As group
we were extremely lucky to use this piece of software as it is used in the industry by lots of editors
however most of them still use AVID. I enjoyed editing on this software so much that I had to download
the free trail online and have ago at home. Premier Pro allows for footage to be cut, sped up or down
and altered. One of the best things about this software is that every time you use it you always learn
something new or different, for example this year I learned how to colour correct images to make them
look more cinematic. Premier Pro was clearly used in the production of our music video as we used it
for editing, however, we also used it to in planning as we edited our focus group and an animatic on it
but we also used in for our evaluation as well as we edited the directors commentary on it. Even though
this software was great we did have a few issues with it, for example on the first day of editing we spent
a good few hours putting all of our footage together on the timeline and the software crashed which
meant we had to redo as it didn't save all of those hours of work in again. This happened a few times
when editing also.

5. PREZI AND SLIDESHARE
• Prezi is one of the most creative ways to present my coursework. It is a relatively new piece of digital
technology that allows the creation and sharing of presentations. It allowed me to create aesthetically
pleasing post for my blog. It is one of the best pieces of technology to present your research and
findings as it does it in a way that the viewer will not get bored and tired of looking at. It also enabled
me to show the view some of my planning for my music videos. I did have some difficulty with Prezi as it
crashed a lot meaning you lost you’re a lot of unsaved work but it also was a struggle deleting un
wanted levels but I overcame these obstacles as was able to create some great Prezi documents.
• Slideshare is a bit different to Prezi as you do not create content on it, however you upload word and
PowerPoint document and it allows for easy viewing of them. Also it makes it a lot easier to but the
PowerPoint and word document onto your Tumblr blog if they are uploaded to slideshare first. I have
used slideshare for all stages of my music video as for some of my research I created PowerPoints to
show the data that I found. Then in the planning stage I uploaded some word documents to slideshare
like my shooting schedule. Then for my production I uploaded the talent release form onto it and then
for my evaluation I uploaded question 4 onto slideshare. Since I have been using slideshare I have had
no problems to deal with as it is easy to use a realaible at all times.

6. ADOBE PHOTOSHOP
• Photoshop is piece of editing software for images and photos only. Like
Premier Pro this is industry standard so we are very lucky to be able to use
it. The things that you are able to do to photos is amazing. I've been using
Photoshop for about 4 years now so I like to think I know my way around it.
Photoshop allows you to shape, cut/crop, apply text and completely
change the look of a image and you wont even be able to recognize the
original. My favourite tool in Photoshop has to be HDR toning. We only
used Photoshop in the production stage of our music video to create the
ancillary texts. As Photoshop is very easy to use it to me next to no time to
create an advert and digipak. A problem that I did have though was when
we broke up for half term I was unable to access the software as we cannot
take it off the school system so I was unable to edit my ancillary text for
about two weeks. However, I was able to download the 7 day free trial and
was able to edit over the holidays.

7. MOBILE PHONES
• With the recent development of technological convergent and the rise if smart phones in particular
iPhone, it is hard to keep mobile phones out of our lives. I used my mobile multiple times during the
different stages of my music video. As you are able to get Tumblr in app store for IPhones it made it
easy to do blog posts from your phone. This is what I did I did the digipak analysis on my phone which
this made is very easy but it is not the best to work from. I also used my mobile phone during the
production of my music video, when filming to get the lip syncing of the actors perfect we played the
song through the phone. This helped us a lot and improved the overall lip syncing of our music video.
However, the mobile phone did not create any difficulties except for one, that is when on Tumblr in the
phone it is very difficult to upload posts and I wouldn’t recommend it.

8. YOUTUBE
• YouTube was one of the key components in the in all three parts in making my music video. It allowed
us to upload videos that we have made onto it and then place it back in our blog. We used it for our
animatic and focus group 1 for the planning stage. Then for the production stage we uploaded our
music video to it, then for the evaluation we used it for our directors commentary and focus group 2.
This was very beneficial as it was an easy way to get the content we made onto Tumblr, however one
problem with YouTube was that when exporting a video it would take a good few hours which during
school time is very difficult to work around.
• YouTube also had another use as when planning and evaluating my music video I had to link theories
and also analyze professional music videos. We had to upload the link of the video to our blog when
referencing or analyzing a music video. This was very easy to do any only took a few seconds to do
which is good as it maximizes time.

9. • I used Google a lot in all three stages of the making of my music video. In the planning and research
stage I used it to research all the theorists and then in planning stage I used Google to get all the photos
for my equipment list and props etc.. Google acted as a gateway for websites like Prezi, Tumblr,
Slideshare and YouTube, as a search engine there is none better than Google as many people use is as
the default. There were no difficulties with go, there rarely is.

10. SURVEYMONKEY
• Surveymonkey was a really useful piece of digital technology however it dies have it faults. We used it
for the research stage of our music video to get feedback from our target audience about what they
though of our idea and what kind of things they enjoyed in music video. Its really easy to use and easy
to send out a survey, however, when the survey is complete and it generates all the tables for you, there
is no way for you to get the tables from there website to your blog. The only way that I could do it was
to screen shot each table and put them in the blog as a picture.