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

Software:

Unsigned

We found a song to use as a basis for our music video using Unsigned. The advantage of using this website is that all artists featured are unsigned, meaning we won't be sued by a record label for using their song. We emailed the band asking for a response to our video, but as of yet they haven't replied.

Odd Shaped Head's Unsigned profile.

Facebook

We used social media to host our music video and Digipak. We did this a large proportion of the users of Facebook are of the age of our target audience, and so their feedback is very valuable to us. Although the band do have a fan page on Facebook, it has been inactive since 2009. Regardless, we posted a link on their page anyway in the hopes that one of their fans watch it and gives us some feedback.

Odd Shaped Head's Facebook fan page, which has 51 likes.

YouTube

YouTube was used extensively in the research phase of our production. We used it to find existing music videos for use as inspiration, and any other video of note I found was posted on my blog for reference. As well as posting full videos, the screen shot tool on Windows was used to capture still images that were captioned to provide an example for the written text. We used YouTube to host our music video and had the ability to both post the URL and embed the video onto other websites. YouTube also proved useful in finding tutorials on how to do certain things, such as creating the striped background, in Photoshop.

Blogger

Blogger hosts all of my Media coursework, from the preliminary research to the final product. There are many advantages of using Blogger over paper to collate coursework. Firstly, every entry to the blog can be easily edited with pictures and videos from any computer, negating the need for USB sticks to transport work between computers. Comments can be posted directly onto the blog, making their content more direct in a manner that can't be lost or damaged. The blog can be accessed by anyone at anytime online, making feedback easy to collect. The posts are catagorised by date added, so it easy to sift through dozens of posts to find one specifically.

Adobe Photoshop CS6

We used Photoshop to create and compile graphics which became our Digipak and poster. I started with very little knowledge of the software, but through experimentation and tutorials, I ended up quite good with the basic tools by the end. Photoshop allowed us to create a Digipak which I thought was to a very high standard.


iMovie

iMovie was used to store and edit our footage and song together into the music video. Progress was slow to begin with but quickened as we got a grasp of how the software worked. The software also exported the finished product onto a USB stick where it could be uploaded.

iTunes

We used iTunes very briefly; to import the song from Jack's phone so it could be used in iMovie.

Prezi

We used Prezi to create our ideas pitch. We used Prezi as we felt the aesthetic was much cleaner than that of say Powerpoint or SlideShare.

Hardware:

Sony camcorder/tripod

We filmed all of our footage on a Sony camcorder. Although the visual quality of the camera was not what we would of liked, its one button start/stop recording onto an SD card made the camera handle well. The tripod was used to stabilise our footage where able, some shots were too close to the floor or at too much of an acute angle for it to be used.

iMac

We used an iMac as they had the software on them we needed to create our video, namely iMovie and iTunes. Luckily, we didn't have a problem with its differences with Windows as we used Macs in a similar manner for AS Media last year.