Draft evaluation question 4.

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

The most used technology throughout my media creation is blogger. This is because this is the website i used to present all of more work and my research of how in the end i cam up with my final media products. Blogger has been very useful as it has been easy to use and has allowed me to put all the little things needed to decide what my final media product would look like.
Me and my partner Laura used Animoto for our pitch and this was a very useful piece of technology as it allowed us to get our pitch across effectively. it was easy to use as we could mainly use images with just a few words explaining what the images were representing.
Photoshop was also one of the main technologies used as it helped me to create my final product for my advert and digipack. Although i did not find it easy to use i did get the hang of it and there were lots of tools that were very useful with in it. An example would be that the red eye reduction helped a lot more my photos. Also the adjustments of lighting helped me to create a better looking image and helped to make both of my products look brighter. Pohotoshop did become very frustrating to me as on my account some of the main tools could not be used or were black and this made it very hard for me to create me product to the best of my ability. It also froze a few time and i had to leave it for hours and wait to see if the work i had done was save. in the end i did manage to pull it together and the tools become available to me. Once it was working i got used to it and i am happy with the product that i created.
We used final cut pro for editing our video and this piece of technology was very easy to use. It allowed us to edit easily and quickly. It was a new program so no one knew how to use it but the simplicity of it was fantastic as it never crashed and allowed our video to be at its best. It had all sorts of effects on it that helped create our story line. An example we used and effect called cold steel for our flashbacks as it helped us show that it was a cold and dark time for our story and also showed that is was a flashback as everything else was in colour. I loved this program as we did not need to worry about it crashing as it automatically save any new work put on, but also it never did crash.
Word was used for my draft advert and digipack as i only wanted it to be simple to show the outlines of what i wanted my product to look like. I was also worried about photoshop as i have bed luck with it and we were limited time and so for my draft though it would be best to do on word as i could see the outlines of what i was thinking and it was easier for me to change it around. I also used word to do some of my Research and planning on before i put it onto my blog. I did this to make sure everything was done right and so i could easily connect it for when i cam to my blag so that everything was in order.
Twitter was used for our band as we wanted to allow our audience to get to know then and view what our band was getting up to. We did frequent tweets from our band telling fans about what they had been up to. We also used twitter to research other bands like ours to see the type of thing their fans enjoyed so that i would help us to relate to our Target audience.
The camera that we used to make our video was a cannon camera and this was an effective camera as it had a good picture with it. I did both the videoing and photos with this camera as i found it easy to use and it allowed me to change effects on the camera such as lighting to suit the place in which i was videoing or taking photos. I also used a tripod for some of my shots as this help to keep a steady image as some of the outside shots were hard because of how windy it was. Some shots we were unable to use the tripod as it wouldn't move easily. As for the photos the tripod was great as it helped me set the picture to how i wanted it and kept it steady while i took the photo.
We used an ipod to help with the lip syncing for our video. We did this by taking it out with us and playing the song we had chose and sang along with it loudly. We found that the louder Laura sang the better her lip syncing looked and so decided to do this throughout all of the video. It also helped us with timing so i could look at when we did and didn't need to record certain parts.
The mac was used to do our music video on and this was a brilliant piece of kit. It was very fast and responded well. It was easy to use once we had gotten used to it. The mac allowed us to not worry about our work as it save everything that is new onto it and so if it did crash, which it didn't, we didn't have to worry too much.
The PC that we used got a bit annoying sometimes as it was slow and didn't respond to the amount of pictures and videos we needed to save in our files. this because very frustrating but for the blog and research it was brilliant. this is because it allowed us to do all the things we wanted to and came up with lots of results that helped.
Googled was used a lot to helped with our research and planning as it came up with results that i may not have thought of and gave me a wide variety of results. The only problem with it was that not everything cam up for example, magazine websites. this was because some sites were banned because of school policy. this became very frustrating when i was looking for inspiration of how a music advert looked. Other than that google was helpful and helped with my research and planning.
Movie maker was used for the making of our animatic, we had many problem with this as when we were trying to upload it, it kept on getting to 30% and then stopped. This was very annoying as we really needed it for a music video so that we could follower our storyboard. Once we had got it on it was very good and worked well to help with the planning of our music video. It also helped us to see what it might look like and we then saw what parts we maybe didn't need or were going to change slightly.
Scribed was used to help present my work from word to my blogger. this was helpful as it meant that i could do my work and check that it was ok and instead of writing it again on my blogger i could put it on from scribed as it was.
Prezi helped me to present My work in an easy way for my readers, this helped because i meant that i could plan what needed saying and make it look nice. Also it was very easy to use and was quick to upload. I found it useful as there were different effects and colours that i could use that would match up to my target audience.
My mobile phoned helped me out an awful lot as it allowed me to contact with the people in the band so that we could all arange when we were free and also for probs to bring. It helped me keep in contact with them and also remind them of things that they needed to do/bring for the music video or photos.
Facebook also helped with my organisation of the music video as it allowed me to cantact with them easily and straight the way if the were online.
The memory stick that i used helped me to convert the videos on my laptop to the macs at school and this was good as i didnt have any of the software on my laptop at home it was useful for me as i could do it all at school quickly and easily. It also helped me convert my photos onto the computer quickly so i had them on ready to use for my digipack and advert.