2. QUESTION 4: How did you use media
technologies in the construction and
research, planning and evaluation stages?
I used various software and hardware
throughout the creation of my three media
products, which helped me to create media
products to a professional standard.
3. Blogger
• At the beginning of the
pre-production stage, an account
on Blogger.com was created to
record all of our research, planning and production work.
• Blogger was particularly helpful because all of our work could be recorded neatly in
the same place where it could be viewed by sections to show the progress of our
project throughout the months.
• It is an online blogging site so we were able to update our blog from anywhere, even
on-the-go which came in handy especially when we were on location filming our
music video and needed to quickly update.
• Blogger itself allowed me to be very creative because it gave me many options when
writing a blog post, such as the ability to embed YouTube videos, insert images and
add links to external websites. This helped my blog to appear much more organised
because my finished media products could be embedded straight into a blog post.
4. Research & Planning Stage
• I used Survey Monkey initially to create free
online questionnaires to send out to determine
the target audience of my media products and
better understand the Indie Rock genre by
gathering feedback. The survey could be posted
to social networking sites such as Facebook and
Twitter and was used as our primary research.
We asked questions which helped to shape our
media products by using the conventions of the
Indie Rock genre that we found out, such as
what fans prefer to see in Indie Rock music
videos.
• Google and Google Maps were used to
research into appropriate locations for filming
our music video, and the use of Google Street
View allowed us to plan where exactly we were
going to film without actually having to be there,
saving time and money. Google search itself
was used to research into the band that we
choose, especially to look up record label
information and find other existing Indie Rock
media products.
5. Construction Stage
• Adobe Photoshop played a large part during
this stage. The album poster was created
using this, as it is professional standard
software that enabled me to edit every detail
to be exactly how I wanted it using the layers
function, which allowed effects to be added
such as ‘Overlay’ or the opacity to be
changed so that certain layers were not as
visible – we used this to place the tie-dye
background over another image on the
album poster. The images for our media
products were edited using Photoshop to
create the ‘vintage’ effect that fit well into the
genre.
• An Apple Macbook Pro was used because it
was professional standard, as well as a
Canon EOS 600D camera to shoot video in
HD quality, ensuring good quality playback
which is essential. Not only could we
capture video, but the DSLR also allowed us
to take photos of our band for the ancillary
texts, making it multi-functional while still
being easy to use.
6. • Final Cut Pro was
used to edit the music
video together. This is
professional standard
software in which The
Lord of the Rings was
edited.
• This software allowed
us to insert the desired
clips onto the timeline
with ‘Weekend’ playing
over the top.
• The small screen
enabled us play our
video back as we went
along, allowing room
to change the way a
clip was edited if there
was any mistakes.
Construction
Stage
Final Cut Pro
Different quality setting were available as the output format for the
video (e.g. HD) which meant that we could process the video in the
same format in which we filmed it. Rendering the video was very
tedious but the end result was excellent.
7. • YouTube played a large role throughout my project. I used it initially to research
other existing music videos in the Indie Rock genre, such as Yuck’s Get Away
which helped to establish the conventions of the genre so that we could recreate
them in our own music video, making sure it would be recognisable to the
audience. This is because YouTube is worldwide and videos from American
bands (and other countries) can be accessed easily.
• After this, I used YouTube to host our qualitative data –
which came in the form of a video interview. This was
effective to host the video on YouTube because we
could gather feedback and then it could also then be
easily embedded into Blogger and the views and
other statistics could be monitored.
• Finally, after the ‘Weekend’ music video had been completed, we uploaded the
finished video to YouTube so that we could gather accurate feedback through
comments and ‘Likes’ or ‘Dislikes’, as well as aiming to promote the band to a
wider audience. I felt that when the video was uploaded the quality of the original
video was lost somewhat but this is due to YouTube scaling down the quality of
videos rather than a fault of our own. However it still looked professional.
Research, Planning,
ConstructionYouTube
8. Evaluation Stage
• During the evaluation stage of my project, I tried to incorporate
different media platforms in which to display work to keep it
interesting and fresh. I used PowerPoint to make presentations that I
could then upload via Slideshare which allows them to be played
and embedded into Blogger. This is very effective because it means
that I could get straight to the point using bullet points in PowerPoint
rather than writing large paragraphs of text.
• Inserting images and moving them around was much easier on
Microsoft PowerPoint than it was on Blogger and so it gave me more
freedom and was much quicker.
