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

Technologies I used... • Pen & paper• SurveyMonkey• Facebook• Brothersoft• Mobile phone• YouTube• Google images• Computer• PowerPoint• Scanner

• Slideshare• blogger• Google Maps• Camera• SD card• Photoshop• Final Cut Pro• Memory stick• Mac book

In the research stages we started off with pen and paper, we got together as a group and we brainstormed potential songs and genres. We didn’t use any media technologies at this stage.

For the music video research, we used YouTube to look up videos of the same genre as our song. We researched the conventions of the videos and looked at pages about the band and the type of music, this gave us more of an idea of what the band’s attitude was like. We produced an analysis of different music videos and then we could get some ideas for our own video.

We used Google images to research digipaks and magazine adverts. We tried to research ones that were related to The King Blues so we could see what the conventions were. We analysed these and put all of our analysis's together to find the conventions and use them in our ancillary products.

Research

To get our audience research we produced a survey on SurveyMonkey and distributed it on forums about The King Blues, ska-punk forums, facebook and music magazine websites. We put them on these because the type of people that use these are those who will like a music video of our chosen genre. It is much easier to make a survey on the internet and getting people to fill it in online than using paper, distributing them and collecting all the results manually. SurveyMonkey collects all the data and figures automatically which is very effective when there is a large number of results to collect.

We made a questionnaire and asked people it and recorded them. We used a mobile phone to record their answers. To convert the file to a suitable one for the blog we used the software ‘Brothersoft’.

All the information and research we collected we put on a blog using the website Blogger. All the work for the coursework is submitted though Blogger. This is useful because it means we can submit all our work electronically and update it when we need to. This is an easier way because it’s simple to put a video on it, which is the main product.

PlanningOnce we got our idea and knew what we were going to do for

the video, we needed to storyboard it. We made a storyboard using pen & paper and then scanned them.

We made a slideshow of the storyboard so that we could electronically include it in our blog on blogger. We used slideshare to make the slideshow.

Once we had decided where we wanted to film some of the video, I went on Google maps and got some screen shots of potential locations that we could use in the video. We then uploaded these screen shots to the blog.

ProductionThe main technology we used in the production of the music video

was a camera. We used a canon 600D and a tripod. The camera we used made the video very high quality. We used it to zoom in and out and to focus on different things throughout the video. We also used this camera to take photos for the digipak and the advert.

When we had shot all of the footage the next stage was editing. We converted the files so that we could edit on a Mac book. We used an SD card because that’s where all of the footage was stored, it was easy to transfer the files on to a Mac book. At the beginning of the editing stage, none of our group had used a Mac book before so we found difficulty in doing some of the editing.

We used the program Final Cut Pro to do the editing. Using this software, we could cut shots, pick out the ones we wanted to use, put them in order, and add any effects we wanted. We used the saturation tool so that we could show a difference in the colour of the two halves of the video.

When the music video was completed, we uploaded it to YouTube. Then it was in video form and we could upload it to our blogs.

To produce the digipak and advert we used Photoshop. We took the photos using the same camera that we used to shoot the video (canon 600D). We them imported the photos to Photoshop. We used this software last year so we all knew how to use it. We used the same text that The King Blues use on their products, we downloaded it from a website and then used it on the digipak and advert. Photoshop was an effective program to use because it’s easy to move/change text and images.