Evaluation question 4
- 1. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
- 2. Computers This is by far the most important piece of technology within this list, as without it almost nothing else would have been possible, and yet a short while ago they were nowhere near as commonplace as they are now, and were significantly more expensive. Computers were extremely useful throughout all of the four stages of creating the package, as well as helping create every individual part of the package – the axillary products as well as the music video. For instance, during the research stage of the production, we almost exclusively used computers to conduct the research that we did – the only exception may be watching music videos on the TV. We used the internet to research the conventions of the genre of our song, as well as to compare our plan for a digipak to that of digipaks that already exist. We used computers to put together our hand-drawn plan for the song to the sound track to figure out the timings and which part would fit, as well as using it to create the actual products – all of the editing was done on a computer, as was the entire process of creating the digipak and magazine advertisement.
- 3. Blogging websites All of my progress throughout the course of this project was documented on a blogging website, and as such I have found it to be an invaluable tool for many reasons. For instance, one thing that it made more efficient was the way that I could look at previous work. Instead of scrolling through all of my previous files looking for something in particular, I could instead simply look through my blog and look at what I had done, along with the notes I had made on it. Another positive thing about using a blogging website to keep track of my work is the potential for sharing it with people. For instance, during this project I have shared the link to my blog with my teacher, who can then use this to give me notes on it. Not only that, but people that I don’t know could potentially use my blog to look at the work that we have done and comment critisisms, good or bad, onto it, allowing me to see what they think. However, there is a downside to using a blogging service so prominently within my coursework. This issue is the fact that it is entirely based online, and as such if I loose internet connection then I may find myself completely unable to gain access to the blog, and as such will be unable to look at what I have previously done, or, indeed, what I have yet to do.
- 4. Online surveys There are many online sites which you can use to survey people, as I found out during the course of this project, but my site of choice was surveymonkey. I discovered that this was actually an incredibly powerful tool that can be utilised whilst creating a project, especially if used within the planning stage. For instance, my groups main way of gathering audience research before we had even started to plan the music video itself, in order to see what the audience desired to see within it. This was not all that we used it for, as we also used it to discover what our audience desired from a digipak, and even for something as simple as asking what the typical gender of our audience was. This was honestly our biggest influence during the planning stage of development – we took the findings from the audience research very seriously, and actually changed our video in order to fit the criteria that they gave. For instance, the audience said that their preferred length of a song was around three and a half minutes, and yet our song was 5 minutes long – as such, we cut it to a more acceptable length. Because of these things, I feel that online survey websites, such as surveymonkey, are incredibly powerful tools that should be utilised by anybody that is going to create something aimed at a specific audience.
- 5. Youtube YouTube was an integral part of the research phase of developing the project, and many of the ideas that we used would not have taken form if we had not utilised this video sharing website. We used YouTube as the primary way of researching videos from other bands that were within the Britpop music genre, and as such used it to note the genre conventions that take place within it. However, research is not the only thing that we used this video sharing platform for. We actually uploaded our video to YouTube, and as such, used it as a way to expose our content to our audience, as well as using the comments section within it as a way of gaining audience feedback. Even the like and dislike system within it could be used as a rudimentary, though not very informative, audience feedback system. I feel that it is an integral part of our project, and it shaped our final product as much as anything else did.
- 6. Camera We obviously used a camera to record the footage that we eventually used within our video, as well as using it to create the pictures that we used on our magazine advert as well as within our digipak. As such it may have been the most important part of the entire project, and would literally have been impossible without it. However, if we go back as far as ten to twenty years, the type of cameras that we used would simply have not been available to us – they would have been much more expensive, as well as much larger and clunkier. Because of this, and because we had no budget, it would have been literally impossible to film outside – if the camera had been damaged in some way it would have been incredibly expensive to repair.
- 7. Social media We used social media predominantly during the audience research segment of our project, but we did use it throughout the entire project. During the audience research my group used social media as our main way of spreading our surveys throughout our potential audience base. We did this through each of us sharing the link to the survey that we had uploaded on surverymonkey on each of our facebooks, as well as on our individual twitter accounts, as well as anything else that we may have had. I believe that this is where most of our audience research came from, yet this could also be a negative point, as it means that most of our audience research was performed through people within our social circle, and as such are likely to like the same things that we like. We also used social media in order to gain audience feedback – we shared out video once again, requesting that all of our friends and acquaintances comment on it if possible. We also had one other use for social media throughout the course of this project, and that was to form a group chat that we were all a part of. Using this, we managed to communicate effectively outside of college hours, as well as share any files that we may be working on – for instance, if one of us had updated something on the digipak, we could then share it with the rest of the group. All in all, social media greatly helped us with our project, as it allowed us more time to work outside of college as well as allowing us to gather people to fill in our audience research.
- 8. Photoshop Photoshop was an immensely useful tool during the construction of our digipak and magazine advertisement. We could not have possible done the work that we had done on our magazine advertisement or digipak without the use of photoshop, or at least a similar photo editing piece of software. The tools that it gives you to work with are extremely useful, and we utilised them well during the course of our project. For instance, the digipak called for a brick background, yet the only picture we had of a brick wall was the one wit the logo of pulp taped to it. To get around this we used the clone tool and copied the images of the bricks over the poster itself as seamlessly as we possibly could, and now it is almost impossible to tell that it is not a different shot altogether. It is the various tools like this that made photoshop an invaluable asset during the construction of our auxiliary products.
- 9. Video editing software (Abode Premier) This was among the most powerful and useful tools that we had at our disposal. The software that we used, Abode Premier, allowed us to take all of the various clips of footage that we had collected and place it all in one place, where we could look at and access any clip, before placing them in any order that we wished it to be in. This helped us immensely in ordering our clips, and placing them in a coherent order that followed the plan that we had previously created. The video editing software that we used allowed us to easily apply special effects to our clips, such as the white static that we applied throughout the entire video. This is a huge change from what editing would have looked like only ten or so years ago. During that time, editing was often done on the film itself, as computers simple didn’t have the memory or computing power to handle such requests.