Question 4

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

This has a long list of different answers as nearly everything we use to create our product on was a media technology. With the rise in technology being rapid we could do almost anything asked to with a piece of digital technology. The project was always going to require a lot of different media technologies so we could complete it and here is an explained list on how we had used each of these. 

Right now I am recording my blog posts on a piece of digital technology called blogger. It is a website upon my computer which enables me to record different posts and keep them all in one place. This would be the main piece of technology I have used in all three stages as it is the one of which I have used to record everything I have done on. Without it it would be a lot more difficult to store all of the work. Blogger has been used for years to make sure that people can either store work or just their own opinions on and will be used for time to come. It has allowed me to share all sorts of media such as pictures, videos and PowerPoint presentations and single slides. 

The next major piece of media technology that has been a significant factor overall in this course was the video camera. The video camera is what has allowed me to do many of the tasks of which we are set throughout the year. The first thing of which it helped me to do was film all of the people answering my questions about the audience research. This allowed me to find out what people expect to see in a Folk/Rock genre music video, without the camera I would not have been able to find out peoples opinions on what should be included in our music video and what they would expect to see in terms of conventions of this genre. The video camera was then used obviously to film the actual product itself, it allowed us to gain our variation of shots and allow us to create a new piece of media which will exist for years to come. Without the video camera I would not be able to gain a very good grade in this piece of work as I would not have been able to film any of the clips I used in the music video.

Another major piece of media technology of which we used was a Dictaphone, a Dictaphone is a piece of technology that allows you to record sounds and voices to then use again at a later date. We used the Dictaphone when we were recording the song for Tei, by having him sing into one of these we were able to keep the song and then upload it to the computer of which we used to put over the video we ended up having and then edit it to make the video and the sound match up. Without the Dictaphone we would not have been able to get the sound very clearly and would have ended up having a bad quality recording leading to the song not sounding very good and making the entire project look like it wasn't up to scratch. 

The piece of digital technology of which we used was Coral Video Studio Pro, this is a piece of software found on the computer which is used solely for editing clips, putting them together, adding sound and effects to each of them to make an overall piece. This piece of media technology allowed us to cut clips to make them go in the correct order we wanted them to go into and also allowed us to put the song over the top. A lot of different features of Coral were  used by us when editing the clips such as:

• Splitting clips - turning one clip into two
• Multi trim of clips - more specific cutting
• Muting clips - take away background noise from narrative clips
• Changing the colour correct to make sure that it looks the same sort of light all the way through.

  Shortening clips and making clips longer.

All of these different attributes allowed us to make our final product happen. 

Another piece of media technology of which we used in our production of our ancillary tasks was Photoshop, Photoshop allowed us to do many different things with the images of which we had collected ourselves and therefore made them look like we were in a better place. For example in the back of our CD cover we were able to make the actor look as if he was looking off over the edge of a stage. We did this by changing the lighting of the photo and leaving one end light as if he was under a stage light and the other end dark as if it was looking over a crowd of people. Without Photoshop we wouldn't have been able to create a lot of our ancillary tasks as this was the piece of technology of which had been using for these.

A piece of media technology that was vital in the planning of our music video sequence was the still image digital camera. When we were planning to create our music video we looked into how we could plan what the shots of which we used were going to look like and to do this we we created a storyboard on a sheet of paper which had a grid on with 10 slots, we drew what we believed would be in the shot and then wrote about what was happening in each shot. When we recorded this on our blog we needed to be able to transfer this information to the computer and that's when the digital camera came into the picture. To do this we took still images of each of the images in the storyboard and then annotated them, this allowed us to show you and keep in our minds what we were planning on doing in the project.

The final, and key media technology of which we have used over and over again in many different areas of the project we have been asked to do is the internet. This has been vital to everything we have done throughout the year. With it being the place of which we store all of our information that we have found whilst using the internet it has turned into the leading form of media technology to grace the planet. It has also been used for research into our chosen genre, with the introduction of Youtube we have been able to find out what the main conventions of a Folk/Rock music video are and have also been able to find out what theorists have affected music videos in the past, therefore leading to us abiding by there theories and creating the best music video we can with our resources. This has also been where we have been able to store our final product for the rest of time. Now we have uploaded the video to youtube it will be able to stay there forever and will also keep all of our song research on.

Overall I believe the key to success in not only this project but to education and examining is media technologies, without them a lot of things become poorly marked and poorly kept. With information being able to be stored in one place people are able to see them whenever they want with a click of a button. It has also been the key to success in the fact that if none of these technologies existed then we would not be able to create the products.