Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planing and evaluation stages?

I used a number of different media technologies in the creation of the video, the most obvious one being a video camera. The kind of video camera that we actually used was a Panasonic HD DV, I think this style of camera was perfect for the job. The quality was good, and we made use of the manual focus with pull focus. The camera was light and compact, so it was easy to transport from location to location. I also used a Nikon D60 DSLR camera, to take my still images in the planning and research stage, mainly when creating my Digipak, and the advert. I used a combination of auto, and manual focus settings on the camera to achieve the best possible results. The camera had a large number of settings and functions which I did not make use of, these could have helped me to achieve better results.

I used two computer programs to edit the photo's and videos. Photoshop for the Photographs, and Premier pro for the videos. I only know how to use photoshop at a basic level, there are many tools that I didn't know how to use, as it is a very in-depth program. The filters and tools I mostly made use of are:
Move Tool
Rectangular Marquee
Crop
Rubber
Lasso and magnetic lasso
Paintbrush
Blur

I also used a combinations of tools to create the smokey effect on the digipak. I drew white lines against the background of the picture, I then clicked "Effect" Then "Liquify". I used the liquify tool to drag the lines about, this created a smokey effect. After this I clicked "Edit" then "Fade Liquify", I faded down to about 50% each time, this helped to make the smoke appear softer and more realistic. Here is a short video of me drawing some smoke on photoshop.



I also used a number of websites to help with organisation, research etc. Facebook was very useful to help organise the cast. I created a group named " A2 Media Studies " and added the cast. I mostly used this for organizational purposes. I mostly used the group to post shooting times, to ensure my cast were available to help but this was not it's only function. The group also helped me to acquire props and costumes from my cast. For example, the location for the band sections is owned by my uncle, who I contacted through facebook. The trikes that were used in the chase scene were also found using facebook. Another function of the group was to help me gain feedback ( I invited people that weren't involved in actually making the video ), I posted a Youtube link to the group and allowed people to comment on it. I recorded their comments and use them to find out how I could have improved on the end result.

Another website which proved very useful was Youtube. I used this site for a number of reasons. Youtube proved invaluable for my genre research, it allowed me to find music videos within the genre quickly and easily. I had no problem using Youtube, I use it a lot out of lessons, and it has a simple, user friendly layout. I feel that my genre research would not have been anywhere near the level that it was at if I hadn't used Youtube. I also used Prezi to help me create my pitch. Prezi is a very unique website, it allows you to make multimedia style pages, which you can create a path around, similar to Powerpoint but on a larger scale. Prezi was very useful as it created an interesting and simple way to present my pitch. The technology was easy to understand, it had a simple interface and I was able to learn to use it quickly.

The one piece of technology that I feel didn't work as well as it could were the computers. For a while the sound on the computer I was using would keep cutting out. This slowed down the editing process as it was very difficult to actually sync the audio with the video. The computers also didn't have a lot of RAM, which made it lag whilst editing, and meant that it took a long time to conform, import clips and export files.

All in all, Technology played a very large part in my project, the use of Web 2.0 was vital, in conjunction with quite a lot of software and hardware. The project would definitely not turned out so well if I did not have all of these tools at my disposal.