media evaluation !!

8/2/2019 Media Evaluation !!

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1. In what ways does your media product use, develop orchallenge codes and conventions of real media products?

Formal ProposalThe coursework task set was to create a 5 minute opening to a documentary. For our documentary,

we decided to create a one off documentary based on the touchy issue of unemployment forteenagers / young adults.The documentary would be a social documentary, focusing on social issues and pressures of whicheffects many in our society today. In preparation for this we had to lots of research and planningbased on who we wanted our target audience to be.We based this research on other documentaries we have seen. We used this research to addconventions other documentaries used to our own to make our documentary as authentic and realisticas possible, giving it a sense of professionalism to our project.

Why Channel 4?Due to our research we found that Channel 4 was the best channel touse for our ident (the channel of which our documentary would be

shown) as this is the most popular channel with our chosen targetaudience.

Documentary

AiringOur documentary would be aired at about 8 or 9pm. As we would air the documentary during primetime television, it would attract a large audience for example teenagers, adults and also adults whodeal with teenagers' everyday such as career workers etc.

Using Codes and ConventionsEach documentary is produced using particular codes and conventions usually with a particularpurpose and audience in mind to separate the documentary from a drama or comedy programme.One convention would be actuality, this is used in a documentary as this is footage of real events,people and places e.g. Jack's Case Study, we followed Jack in his struggle to find work.

Why are thin people not fat?Video Link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-A0iHSdcAThis youtube link shows many conventions we used in our research stage in producing ourdocumentary. This 5 minute opening helped us to see the lay out in which documentaries are set upe.g. voiceover introducing the topic and title as the title appears on screen.

Use ofCameraWe used a variety of shot types and different angles as this isnecessary to keep the viewer entertained and focused on the screen.e.g. Medium Close Up MCU and Close Ups CU, conventional duringan interview as it allows the audience to feel connected to the personspeaking as they can clearly see their facial features making it morepersonal to the viewer allowing them to relate to our characters.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-A0iHSdcAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6-A0iHSdcA


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Transitions- transitions help our documentary flow well. Therewas plenty of options for us to choose from out of transitions, butwe didnt feel the need to use all of these transitions, so decided touse only two as we were consistent throughout. Transitions areused to tell the viewer this is a next chapter in the documentary.We used additive dissolve and page turner in our documentary.

Zooms- we use this convention during the introduction of Jack, while the voiceover introduces hiscase study the camera zooms in and out on him reading a book in the library about Job hunting.Zooms are used effectively as they allow the viewer to get a look at the emotions and allow the viewerto feel they are getting to know Jack on a more personal level rather than just an interview shot usingonly a medium close up.

Establishing ShotsWe used a wide range of establishing shots throughout our documentary, specifically in the montage.The montage is very important and we as a group put a lot of thought into this as this is what theaudience will see in the first few seconds deciding to view or not to view. We used a range of shortclips that connect to our chosen topics, such as establishing shots of Solihull, the Job Centre andSolihull Sixth Form College to set the scene of where this documentary was set.


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Documentaries such as Educating Essex use establishing shots to tell the audience where thedocumentary style programme is set, Essex.

Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUShvUA_Vo&feature=youtu.be&has_verified=1

Montage of ImagesWe used a variety of images for our opening minute to build our opening montage. The openingmontage is key for our documentary as this is what the viewer will see for the first few seconds of thedocumentary. Tuning them in or tuning them out of watching our documentary. For this we thought itbest to have establishing shots of our location: Solihull (as shown above), images of our topic:Unemployment e.g. Job Wanted Signs and youth today as that it what our topic is focused on.

If I could have one improvement if I were to do it again, I would have liked to include more ranges ofimages and footage. As we lacked footage in our documentary we had to repeat some footage orimages which made our documentary seem repetitive.

Presenter and VoiceoverWithin our documentary, we used a presenter(Ami Rutter) to appear twice outside Solihull SixthForm College. Ami introduced the topic, TheJobless Generation along with facts and statistics,and also the college "we are here at Solihull SixthForm to find out how and why..."We used a presenter to make our documentarymore personal and allow the viewer to see theperson behind the scenes. However although AmiRutter was the presenter I stepped in as thevoiceover as Ami was unavailable to record for voice over recordings as she was focusing on othertasks, her own ancillary task: listings page.So although the presenter introduces the topic the voice over speaks to the viewer throughout thedocumentary to keep the documentary flowing and moving forward.

Interviews and Vox Pops

To make a successful documentary you have to use a varietyof interviews, thus showing peoples opinions on this topicaldiscussion. We used a variety of age and gender to allowdifferent opinions on the matter. Specialists in the subjectsuch as: Emma Hurst from College Careers Office andSharon Greenall from Connections Centre were also featuredin this documentary. We did attempt to get an interviewsomeone from the Job Centre in Solihull but unfortunatelythey did not respond to our letter.

If we were to do it again I would hope to get more interviewswith males as we lacked in this, however we did have a casestudy featuring a male student.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUShvUA_Vo&feature=youtu.be&has_verified=1http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxUShvUA_Vo&feature=youtu.be&has_verified=1


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We also used Vox-Pops from Students around the college to provide a view from "normal" female and

male students about the pressures and struggles they have of finding a job as a success or not.

Our Documentary Real Documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhs3uGCNetI

Case StudyWe decided to use one of ourselves for a case studyfeatured in our documentary as we would be able toproduce footage easily as we would all be there duringour lessons. Jack Bradbury was used as a typical 17

year old student at Solihull Sixth Form College as wefollowed him throughout his journey in getting a job.We used a range of establishing shots, zooms,medium close ups when filming Jack to make ourdocumentary as authentic as possible to a realdocumentary.

Mise en SceneWe thought long and hard on which setting we wanted our documentary to be set. As this is aboutyouth and our target audience was aged from 16 and over we decided to film mostly at our college,Solihull Sixth Form, because as well as easy access to the Colleges site we also had many studentsthere willing to talk to us about their search for a job or what they wanted to do when they leaveCollege and how they plan to get this.

Captions and TextsJoe Ferrari as Student D he was in charge of captions and texts, we used captions to introduce our
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhs3uGCNetIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhs3uGCNetI


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interviewers (Emma Hurst and Sharon Greenall), presenter (Ami Rutter) and case study (JackBradbury)

Ou r

Documentary Real Documentary from: BBC Panorama

We also produced Credits at the start of the

documentary to give credit to ourselves asproducers of our documentary.

MusicMost media products such as documentaries will use someform of background music. Music chosen for ourdocumentary was chosen carefully as we wanted to makesure we set the right tone for our piece. We were notallowed to use any copyrighted music so used tracksapproved by the media board at our College.

Ancillary TasksListings Page this was produced in a software called InDesign. When producingour listings page we had to a lot of research into the layout and typical set up of alistings page advertising a programme. We were also given feedback on our listingspage, improvements we could annotate given to us by our fellow class mates andtarget audience. Improvements such as giving our title, The Broken Generation? adrop shadow making the title bolder and more able to stand out to a reader.


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In doing this research we found many conventions and ideas that we picked up on to produce ourlistings page to seem as realistic as possible e.g. column layout, title bold font eye catching to theaudience, pull quotes, many images such as a dominated image, drop caps, credits and picture credit,page reference etc.

Radio Trailer-this was produced in softwarecalled Garage Band. For this we had to also dolots of research in radio trailers and radiochannels as we would be thinking of which radiowe would want our radio trailer to be on, again


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linking to our target audience as we would need to research the popularity of radio stations and whichone our target audience listened to the most.

Through research we found conventions such as sound, length of clip and the levels they are at whichall make up the radio trailer are important as the viewer cannot see anything they can only hear andthe sound levels are important to set the right tone to the documentary and radio trailer. We had to

pick our sound bytes carefully as they had to be important quotes given from our interviewees.

We also had to write a script for our Radio Trailer we used 4 different voices: Radio Trailer Presenter,Documentary Presenter, Sharon Greenall interviewee and Jack Bradbury case study, to make ourtrailer sound authentic. Using a presenter Joe Ferrari and important sound bytes / quotes taken fromour documentary to capture and interest the listener to watch our documentary. It was important to tellthe audience when and where they can watch our documentary Channel 4 8 Oclock this SaturdayNight

Script for our Radio Trailer:

Presenter: New and exclusive to channel 4, a one off documentary

Ami Rutter(presenter on the documentary): This is the jobless generation

Presenter: This Saturday night, channel 4 investigates the struggle young people go through in life

after college.

Sharon Greenall: Quote from the documentary about younger people not having the correct

experience.

Presenter: In 2012 it brings a new generation to the difficulties of the economical climate of the 21st

century.

Jack Bradbury: No they said there werent any jobs available, so Im just going to have to keep

looking really.

Presenter: Saturday Night, 8pm, this is your future.


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2. How effective is the combination of your main product andancillary tasks?DocumentaryOur main task, our documentary wasbased around Youth Unemployment andhow this has progressed and increasedover the years. The audience watchingthe documentary could relate to this asthey could be in this situation or knowsomeone affected by this topic. As wesay

Ancillary TasksBoth the Listings Page and Radio Trailerpurpose were to promote and advertiseour final, completed documentary, tocreate a brand image by connecting allthree tasks together and to get a biggeraudience to watch our documentary. Ourmain target audience were students or young adults aged 16 22, both of male and female gender,affecting all ethnicities.

OurRadio Trailers purpose was to advertise our main task.We did this by trying to connect the two tasks, by having abrand identity. Also by having grab quotes taken specifically

from our documentary; this gave the audience a feel or asneak preview into what they would be watching thisSaturday night. We used a male speaker for our RadioTrailer presenter and had a male and two female speakersfrom the documentary. As jobs is not a gender issue as it was50 years ago but more an age issue as it says in thedocumentary and radio trailer some are saying they needexperience to get a job experience comes with age. The titleis stated by the documentaries presenter, Ami Rutter and thenrepeated by the Radio Trailer presenter, Joe Ferrari includingthe day and time. With our radio trailer we didnt have time tostate what radio station it would be played on as the radiotrailer is 30 seconds long and we didnt have time to introduce the

station. But if we did I think we would have chosen Capital FM asthese are local radio stations that are popular with our targetaudience as they play current Pop or R&B music, so hopefully itwould have helped with our promotion for our documentary.


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OurListings Page articles purpose was also to promote and advertise our documentary. As ourdocumentary is called The Jobless Generation we decided to call our listings page The BrokenGeneration although changing the word Jobless to Broken we kept to the theme and brand ofgeneration as we are talking about the current teenage / young adult generation of the 21st centuryand the unemployment crises in the current UK. Using images such as Job Centre and Jobnewspapers this links nicely to our topic and idea of the discussion of unemployment. As our target

audience was our class mates we could get feedback easily if necessary to help with annotations andimprovements. This specific target audience probably would not read a newspaper as it wouldntappeal to them to read therefore it would be best to set this article in a television magazine such asthe Radio Times (as it says next to the page reference), something my target audience would read.

The article gives the audience and idea of the documentary, it has images from the documentary andintroduces our interviewees and case study: Jack Bradbury expressed in the picture caption asEmotionally Drained. The article gives a brief introduction about the documentary and the number ofexpert opinions includes. The article has quotes to fascinate the audience into reading more:

rop Caps

Title (Big & Bold with Drop Shadow)similarly named to programme.

Column Layout

Date, Title of Magazine

ubheadingummarisero ramme

Grab

Quotes

OtherImages fromprogramme

itle, Date,me, Channel

or programme

age Number

ImageDominated


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These particular quotes may make the reader think, yes I get the same problem and interest thereader to read the article and/or watch the documentary.Mutual colours were used so our target audience couldnt be restricted to only one gender, we aim totarget at both male and female audience so the mutualcolours allows us to do this successfully.

In all three tasks the brand name The Jobless Generationwas mentioned to advertise to the audience the title of ourdocumentary, a clever name as this tells the audience it isabout a certain age period of which are struggling withemployment. Allowing the reader and viewer to ask why?Which is what we would like to answer. Although the radiotrailer and listings page may not be as popular with mytarget audience it is more a promotional tool to a widerrange of people (our primary and secondary target audience) to advertise the main event on SaturdayNight at 8pm, our documentary. I would also probably advertise through theinternet, on popular websites such as Facebook or on television breaks betweenpopular programmes that interest my target audience such as: Holly Oaks or TheSimpsons.

3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?

After completing our documentary we felt that it was veryimportant to get a variety of feedback from our peers. It gave usa chance to see how successful our documentary, listings pageand radio trailer were and where we could improve if we had thechance to do it again. We handed out questionnaires (providedby the teacher) to our target audience to get their views andopinions. We did understand that this was a very limited

resource as there was very few (20 people) viewing ourproducts from our College. To get more of an accurate result wewould have widened our research into feedback, and allowed abigger audience to view our product(s).

Primary Target Audience:- Both Male and Female- Aged 16 22Multicultural British Audience (as it is about Unemployment in the UK)Mainly Social Class C (students and part time workers)

We made profiles from our survey to do with who our target audience, who would be linking withgender, age, area and occupation.


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Secondary Target Audience:Close relation to our target audience e.g. parents, career workers, teachers etc.Channel 4 not only targets our target audience but a wide range of viewers so wewanted to take advantage of that and attract a range of viewers to the programme.

Feedback on our Documentary

Above are images of fellow students giving feedback on our documentary (filling in ourquestionnaire). The questionnaire asked for the target audience to give their views on how successfulwe did the task, asking them to rate the documentary as either:

Excellent Very Good Good Satisfactory Poor

Below are bar charts I produced on the basis of our feed back given from our audience.


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Overall Rating

poor 0

satisfactory 0

good 6

very good 5

excellent 1

Choice of Topic

poor 0

satisfactory 0

good 1

very good 8

excellent 3

Editing

poor 0

satisfactory 0

good 5very good 7

excellent 0

Sound

poor 0

satisfactory 4

good 6

very good 2

excellent 0

Overall Rating

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

poor

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent

Choice of Topic

0 2 4 6 8 1

poor

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent

Editing

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent

Sound

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent

Transitions

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent


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Transitions

poor 0

satisfactory 1

good 4

very good 6

excellent 1

Strengths of Documentary:

- Good Cuts

- Good use of interviews (variety and relevance to topic)

- Good editing

- Good concept of a job search (content)

- Good locations of the filming (content)

Overall I am really happy with the feedback that we received for our final task. As well as advantagesthere were also weaknesses as there is always room to improve.

Weaknesses of Documentary:- Poor sound quality (music being too loud, or too quiet in parts, not being able to hear people

in the shots- Shaky camera movement- Microphone in some of the shots (3 people commented on this)

We would have loved to reshoot some footages due to sound quality, movement and the microphone

in the shot. But due to the time limit we had available we were unable to do this.

Radio Trailer Feedback:Advantages:

- Good background music- Good voiceover- Presenter was informative, helping to understand the topic- Good cuts and quotes- Flows well

Disadvantages:- Sound bytes could be more exciting- Sound levels varied- Sound was fuzzy in places- Sound levels were not balanced and inconsistent throughout

For ourRadio Trailerwe were scored out of 10. These results were as follows: 9, 9, 9, 8, 8 and 8therefore giving us a grand total of 51 / 60 which I am very pleased with. If I were to produce theRadio Trailer again I would have loved to reshoot some dodgy sound bytes therefore improving the

quality of sound and the information given from quote.


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Listings Page FeedbackAdvantages:-

- Good layout- Good use of images

Disadvantages:- Could have improved images using Photo Shop

- More colour could have been added, make title stand outmore

- Coloured background

4. How did you use media technologies in theconstruction and research, planning and

evaluation stages?

Research and PlanningYouTube was a very useful website when doing our research into documentaries; wewere able to watch many different documentaries through searching them on this videobroadcasting website. These websites allowed us to pick up on usefulcodes and conventions that were used, so we could add them into ourown documentary to add professionalism and also look at the range of

opportunities there were. It also helped us to make decisions, like what topic wewould base our documentary on, we viewed several genre documentaries onYouTube to help us make our decision and Youth Unemployment we found we asteenagers aged 17 18 could most relate too as we ourselves are experiencing thistopical subject. We could easily find research online and access specialists into thistopic as we go to Solihull Sixth Form College.

Channel 4OD was also a website we used for our research and planning, as agroup we decided on a target audience, and then research throughquestionnaires that channel 4 was the most popularamong our audience channel 4 on demandallowed us to view previous documentaries aimed atour audience, by doing this we could analyse thecodes and conventions used, like having informalinterviews and possibly adding humour. For myparticular part of research and planning I viewed theFairy Job Mother and Educating Essex.

The Fairy Job Mother:http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-fairy-jobmother/4od
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-fairy-jobmother/4odhttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/-er8funAcstA/TrlvgBrRdyI/AAAAAAAABQ8/3T2CDhtBCow/s1600/jobmother.jpghttp://1.bp.blogspot.com/-er8funAcstA/TrlvgBrRdyI/AAAAAAAABQ8/3T2CDhtBCow/s1600/jobmother.jpghttp://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-fairy-jobmother/4od


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All of our research, planning and evaluation work was all uploadedand posted onto our blog onwww.blogger.com. When first beingintroduced to this website at the start of the year it did confuse me as Ihad never used this before. The blog was accessible in college and at

home, this allowed us to access our work. This was useful to keep up with our deadlines for eachpiece set when blogging. As we created our documentary as a group, it helped us all by uploadingindividual work allowing us to get credit for the amount of work we have all contributed. We thereforeknew what stage we were at during production so could see what was needed to be done orimproved. Time management was also important as all work was dated and timed so it would show if

we met our deadlines. Our Profile: http://c03documentary11.blogspot.com/

Blogger enables us to annotate our work, by adding photos, videos and giving examples such as print

screens of our production. This helped give evidence of the work that we had done and make the blogmore appealing.

During ourcourse workproject weused theinternet a lot,and Google

search engine for research into facts andstatistics or other documentaries about YouthUnemployment.
http://www.blogger.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://c03documentary11.blogspot.com/http://www.blogger.com/http://c03documentary11.blogspot.com/


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We used Hotmail to email Sharon Greenall from Solihull Connections Centre, to ask permission for aninterview to get an insight into her views on job rates etc.

We also used our colleges contact system called ILP, this allows us toall our contact our teachers around the College. We used this to contactour Colleges careers adviser: Emma Hurst.

Final Cut ExpressThis software we used to edit our documentary footage and images, bringing ourdocumentary to life and together. At first it took me time to get to grips with thesoftware as I had never used this before. However it was very useful as it allowed us to

select the footage that we wanted to use in the documentary and cut it into our finalproject. We also added sound and text using this programme.

Timeline

Bins /olders withfootage

Sound

Replayed thefootage fromthe timeline it

would playhere

Images

Captions

Credits IdentOut of Sync

Click here fortransitions


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I also learnt how to log and transfer my footage this means I would play back my footage and editthe important footage I would like to use in my documentary then transfer this onto the main database.

Camera use stills, shots, footageDuring our planning stage we used a camera totake stills and images for our story board (producedon Comic Life) and image montage, we consideredthe images that would be relevant and appropriatefor the genre, when taking and filming the images,we always considered the mise-en-scene, everydetail the viewer would see on screen is of

importance. For example during interviews e.g.Emma Hurst has a computer screen in the background with thewww.apprentiships.org websiteon screen.

The angle of each shot was also very important,e.g. close ups and zooms out when voiceoverintroduces Jack Bradbury, our case study to seehis facial expressions and the books he is readingabout jobs.

We took a lot of images and then chose from thebest, bearing in mind that we needed a variety to keep the audiences attention. From doing this I

learnt to always be aware of the angle of the shot and to take a variety as the first picture isnt alwaysthe best. The mise-en-scene as it adds to the professionalism of the overall documentary.

When filming the footage, we had to use a tripodwith every shot as this contributed to the realismand professionalism of the shot. As it would make itmore focused and centre, also important was thatthe bubble would be in the centre meaning thetripod and camera was level to make the framingmore accurate for the footage and shot. Filmingthe footage was one of the most importantprocesses throughout the making of the documentary, as this is what theviewers are going to see, so we aimed for good quality. If I were to do this

again I would have loved to redo some footage and some was not framedproperly and some footage had the microphone in the shot (although we did
http://www.apprentiships.org/http://www.apprentiships.org/


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our best to reframe this and hide this). Also we were unable to use some footage we had recorded asthe sound quality was bad.

Organisation was very important during production as if we were to lose our footage,sounds or work then we would have to redo that piece of work again.

The majority of our documentary production tookplace on the apple macs in our college, I havenever worked on one of these until now and foundthem of really good quality and modern as theyoffer many programmes and softwares I have neverused before. e.g. Final Cut Express, Comic Life,

iDVD, Garage Band.

Final Cut Express was easy andsimple enough to use. You wouldimport the files for music andimages and log and transfer thefootage you wanted in yourdocumentary.

Comic Life was used to create our Story Boards for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th,5th minute and overall documentary. We selected a layout that wewanted to use and dragged onto the empty white page. We then

added text and images. We highlighted and clicked bigger for largerfont and smaller for a smaller font to keep the text inside the textbox.


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We used InDesign to create ourListings Page. This was helpful as itallows us to create columns, add images, add drop caps and dropshadow (specifically on our title The Broken Generation?

And Garage Band for ourRadio Trailer,this allowed us to see the timings of thetrailer and how long each section was, wecould adjust the volume settings easilyusing this software.

Lettering,allowed meto title thestoryboard

rag the text boxesext to the images andpe what is happeningthe picture.

SpeechBubbles

LayoutSelection

Finder would search your foldersto help you find your images.Once found just dragged thephotos into the boxes.


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Finally we used IDVD to burn the documentaryontoa disk to complete the coursework and enable us toshow the class this was very simple we just clickedburn disk and selected our documentary and it burntto DVD for our coursework, we also made sparecopies for ourselves.

EvaluationOnce all the construction, research and planning stages were done I did myevaluation. I used a number of techniques to complete this, like screenshots of my work using the Print Screen Buttonand then copying and pasting images into my evaluation. I also copiedimages from our blog that we had previously print screened and bloggedabout.I used a range of font sizes and colours and also types of font to keep avariety. I did my evaluation on Microsoft Word but also used Microsoft Excelto produce bar charts of feedback and results. Then after completing myevaluation I intend to copy it to Scribd and post it on my blog.

MasterVolume

usic TrackVolume

usic Track

Sound ByteTrack Volume

Timeline

Sound Bytes Track

Overall Rating

0 1 2 3 4 5 6

poor

satisfactory

good

very good

excellent


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Summary of

Overall from doing this task mytechnical knowledge has reallygrown and I feel very confidentin using a wider range ofsoftwares than I did before thiscourse.

media evaluation !!

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