Evaluation (Four).

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

The main media technologies used throughout my coursework were Final Cut Pro, Garage Band, Blogger, YouTube and iTunes.

When researching my target audience I used iTunes to identify different artists of a similar genre, and discovered what consumers frequently bought. When I looked at Pumped Up Kicks by Foster the People, I found that people commonly bought music by other artists such as Gotye and Cage the Elephant, both artists who influenced me when creating the song an both artists that supported the genre.

The main media technology I used was Blogger. Blogger enabled me to record my ideas as they came to me, and to post important research as well as my print productions. Blogger is highly useful as everything is kept in one place, and is incredibly easy to access. You can also comment on your own posts and receive important feedback from other users, as well as label each post and file it to keep everything easy to follow.

I used Garage Band to create and record the song. Garage Band is incredibly easy to follow, and has a wide range of sound effects that can be easily applied to your song. The whole process of using Garage Band on the Macs allowed me to become familiar with the Apple Macs, and increased my confidence in using basic editing tools – I feel this prepared me for using Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro was used to create the final edit of my music video, and was straight forward in creating a basic video. The editing between cuts within my video are actually very basic, as I only had a few days to create the entire video. Final Cut allowed me to enhance the colour within the video; I used RGB balance to create more intense blues and greens in order to get a more ‘vintage film style’ image. I also used a tool to create a dark blur around the corners of the screen, once again to enhance the vintage style. Another key tool I used on Final Cut was the tool to both speed up and reverse clips, these were used on the ‘home movie style’ shot in which the sequence was fast paced and imperfect.  

Photoshop CS5 was used on my print productions. I’ve got Photoshop on my laptop at home so I was able to use it with ease, and without any complications. I used Photoshop to adjust levels of contrast and to also adjust colour. For my digipak I actually dulled the colours slightly in order to create a certain subtlety, as well as applying the text. On my magazine advertisement I adjusted the colour balance to give it a more tea stained hue and to make it look weathered, again I adjusted the contrast balance to highlight the darker tones and create more contrast within the print. I also used it to apply the text and ‘burned’ the edges to create more tonal variation.

Lastly YouTube was used to publish the finished video, and release it to the public audience. YouTube is a great way to record and analyse how many people are interested in your video, what they think of it and how frequently it’s being viewed on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. Other users are able to comment on your videos and offer useful feedback, whether it’s praise or constructive criticism.

Over all a variety of technologies were used to plan, create and publish all three of my productions. Each offered a uniqueness that inspired my productions, and offered the appropriate tools to create variation and diversity. Technology enabled me to enhance some of my hand made products – especially the digipak and the magazine advertisement – without Photoshop I wouldn’t have been able to tweak colour and apply text creating a more professional outcome.