Evaluation Question 4 Draft - Michael

Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout this project, the technology I have used has played an exceedingly important part in the planning, creation and evaluation of the final product of both our music video and my personal ancillary products. 

Pre-Production: Before producing my media product, in the research and planning stages of my project, different softwares and technologies became useful to me. The blogging site 'Blogger' became incredibly useful for documenting and recording our progress for both the music video and solo ancillary text projects. I used the site to upload different stages of research and planning. By recording and storing all this information I was able to look back and make sure I was following the right plan that I had made for myself. I was also able show my journey to the final product by posting documents comparing genre conventions, planning my product, analyzing pre-existing texts and  many other helpful tasks. Aswell as becoming useful before making the product, Blogger became very helpful during the production of my product and the post-production stages. I used the blog we had made to not only store planning, but also the final products. Both the music video we created and my own personal ancillary products were posted on this blog. They became helpful and useful after production for the same reason. We all used this site to post our evaluations also. 

Other than Blogger, we used sites such as Dropbox to help us store work and give each other access to images and clips. In the group work section of the pre-production (e.g. planning the main video) this became very useful and we used it very regularly. This linked well with Blogger as items, such as images, were regularly posted in Dropbox before being posted on Blogger alongside some text. Personally I found search engines very useful at this stage of the project. By using search engines, such as Google, I was able to look on the internet for examples of texts that we could use to analyse for both planning and researching purposes. By finding pre-existing examples of videos, digipaks and posters I was able to plan for our own media products in much greater detail to ensure they were as accurate to conventions as possible.. 

Production: The production stage was the one with the widest variety of software and technologies used. During this stage we needed lots of hardware and software to ensure both my own products could be made, and so that we could all make the video. When filming the video we used three different cameras over a period of a few weeks, as not all of the group could film when everyone else was free. The first camera we used was a handheld camcorder that we borrowed from school (Panasonic HC-V700). Unfortunately  this camera wasn't of a very high standard and didn't appear brilliantly on all of the shots we had taken. We decided to film the rest of the shots between two cameras, a low end DSLR (Canon 100D) and a high end comparative (Nikon D7200). We had to split the filming between the two due to lack of free time for filming between all the group members. Personally, I filmed alot of the shots and was very pleased with the use of the two DSLR cameras. One of the members in our group owned a filming grip, which made the task of filming with a bulky camera much easier and steadier. The type of camera we chose to use made a vase impact on our end  product, the only negative Being the change in quality at certain points in the video.

During the production stages of the project, as a group we used many communication sites to stay in touch, mainly to plan filming availability and other technicalities. We found the app 'WhatsApp' became very useful due to the easy nature of the communication techniques and the fact the majority of phones and the group members had access to it.  

The only hardware I used when creating my personal digipak and magazine advert was similar to that of the video. I used my own Canon 70d to take the photos that were used inside and on the front and back of the digipak, as well as the large image in the center of the magazine advert. Although this was the only hardware used, I did however use the software 'Photoshop' to create both of these ancillary texts. I had used Photoshop in the past in the AS course and have thoroughly enjoyed it. As i had used the software in the past it meant i was able to use it full to create both of these products well and to make them appear as professional as possible. I used cropping, blurring, re-sizing and many other techniques within the software to create the best possible series of media product.  

Post-Production: During post-production we all worked alongside each other as a group to edit all the clips we had captured together. We used a Mac and the software 'Final Cut Pro X' to complete this task. We all found this software to be very simple, easy to use and helpful. Without this software editing our video would have been a much more complicated and stressful experience. Within the software we used techniques such as clipping and  fading to ensure both the audio of the song and the visuals of the video clips were as exactly to the plan as we had originally wanted them. This software was one of the most important factors in the overall creation of our entire project.  The only option we had to edit the clips was 'Adobe Premiere Pro', we choose as a group to use Final Cut Pro as it appeared much simplier and easier, and as we were all first time users, this was important.