Evaluation Question 4

How I used media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? 

Planning Stage 



Over the duration of the course I used a range of different technologies for my project to keep it as interesting as possible and to help me create a realist, professional end product.  These technologies allowed me to be more creative and efficient when planning and presenting research.


I heavily replied upon blogger to store and present all the research I found. I also used it to plan my music video and other media texts. Blogger was very easy to get to grips, however I have used it in past projects so I am Familiar with it. I thought this would be the best technology to publish my work as I could access it from anywhere since it is online based. Its simple layout also means its very easy to post blogs. Blogger was very resourceful as it allowed me to look at past work to give me a heads up.



My experience has not all been positive with blogger however, this was because many images had to be of a certain type so that I could upload them onto my blogs. I also encountered connectivity issues getting onto the website, which meant I couldn't access my work. to get around this I used Microsoft word as a substitute until the site was back up and working. The website also looked very plain and didn't offer many customisation options for my blogs so they looked more appealing.

I used YouTube to have a look at examples of music videos, to help me gain an idea how I should start planning my own. I also did some of my research through informative videos I found on YouTube. This is also where I uploaded my final video so that others could see and review it.











A technology that I found really useful for research and looking at pre-existing albums and digipaks was google images. This provided me with an idea of what stereotypical pop albums and digipaks looked like. This enabled me to plan the types of shots I would need to take for my own media texts.


I used Prezi a few times during my research and planning. This was because it was a change from blogger and made my research very clear and easy to read. It also had more features than blogger and allowed me to easily upload images and change the background of the presentation. I felt this made my research more interesting and indulging to readers.



In the early stages of planning for my video I tested out shots for my video with an iPad. This allowed me to test various angles and plan what I would do for my real music video. I did consider using it for the real video, however it didn't have a tripod and I wasn't satisfied with the video quality.







Production Stage

The images for my digipak and advert were taken on the Canon DSLR. This was because I had experience with using this camera I thought it would be more efficient to use this camera to take these shots. I did encounter a few issues getting the camera to focus, which is why for the filming I decided to use a different camera when recording the real music video.

I used the Sony FDR-AX33 to record my music video, which is a
4K video camera. The footage I captured with this camera was of very high quality, however this did mean the rendering process of the video took a while. This camera came in a small bag and folding tripod which meant I could easily move to different locations with ease. The camera has various different options and effects I could apply to my video, which were very useful.



 I created my media texts using various different software to add various special affects and details to ensure my product looked as realistic as possible.

For the creation of my music video I used Sony Vegas Pro. Before this course I had never used this software, which did mean I had to watch a few tutorials on YouTube to learn the basic. After I
watched a few videos it became much simpler and natural to use. I found it very useful how I could have more than one stage and also have two different previews going on at the same time. This software included lots of special effects such as fades. It also had a tool which could be used to overlap footage appearing as quick cuts. However it did crash a few times while I was editing and while the video was rendering. I had to look into this online and adjusted my setting so that the software was optimized to the footage quality.



I used Adobe Fireworks to edit the text and some of the images for my magazine advert and digipak. I used this software because I am very familiar with it as I have used it in the past. Its large variety of fonts and colours meant I had a large choice and could choice one that I thought would fit well with my music video.








To produce the images for my advert and digipak I also used Photoshop, which is really good for editing images as it has a large library of filters and effects. I had never used this program before, but found it really to understand and use.






I actually put together and created my digipak and magazine advert in Adobe InDesign. I did this because it had templates, which made creating my products much easier as I didn't have to look for these online. In did have some experience with this software form the previous year, although it lacked any effects or font tools. I also didn't find it very easy to navigate through the tools, so I did most of this on Photoshop and Adobe FireWorks which had more options.

Evaluation Stage 

In this stage I have used mostly the same technologies as the research and planning stages such as blogger and Prezi to present them. However I did use one new technology during this stage which was Giphy. This software enabled me to create gifs, which enbled me to create short clips of certain aspects from my video to evaluate and analyse. I had never used this website, but it was very useful and will definitely be using it again in the future.