EVALUATION Q3: How did you use media technologies in the constructions and research, planning and evaluation stages?

QUESTION THREE.

During the making of my media products including my music video and my ancillary texts. I used a variety of media technology to help me with constructing, researching, planning and evaluating my coursework.

Video camera.

For the music video, we got the opportunity to use a brand new state of the art video camera. Without this high quality video camera, the music video wouldn't have been possible.


When I first got around the use the camera, I didn't really know how to use it. However, through experimentation I finally learnt how to use it. First of all, I made sure I had a properly charged camera battery including spares so we never ran out of power during filiming. The battery compartment was in the back of the camera and it could only fit in one way.

Blackberry 9900 - a convergent device.

When we were filming we had to take a lot of shots, so we definitely had to know how to use the record and playback function. When we were finished with filming a shot. We always played scenes back to make sure the camera was set on the tripod straight and that the lighting was of a good standard. We put the camera in 'automode' so it took care of all the technicalities like the black and white balance in our shots. We didn't worry about sound, as we planned to put our song over and sync it to the video anyway. During filming, we also used my mobile phone to play the song so I knew when to lipsync. I downloaded our chosen song from Itunes and transferred it to my phone via USB. This was a quick and efficient way of me downloading a high quality copies of the song and being able to listen to it on the device.

Blogger helped me a lot, especially during the planning stages. Without blogger, I wouldn't have been able to record my journey and reflect back on it. It was almost like a personal diary. In AS i did know how to use blogger but I think A2 i have expanded my skills and now I know how to configure things such as HTML, etc. Below is a video of my animatic, and I will explain below how I have created it

Digital camera - convergent device

We made animatics by taking pictures of little doll figures representing the artist and the dancers in front of a backdrop which are pictures of the Barbican centre. We put an image of our planned location on Google Maps and simply held the dolls in front of it to represent the performance and characters. We used a standard digital camera to take the pictures by clicking the button on the top to take the pictures. We tried to get the best lighting as possible so we made sure it was set to automatic and flash to get clear pictures. To upload the pictures onto the Macs we had to get an SD card reader and insert the memory card into it to read the images we took. Once that was done, we uploaded the pictures onto Final Cut Pro and simple put the pictures in the order that we wanted it to go and also so it could be on time with the song. In order to place our song onto Final Cut pro, we had to convert Youtube clips using a program called Clipgrap on the mac which converts Youtube clips into MP4 films and import it into Final Cut Pro. I also placed pics on the timeline and make sure its to the beat, which proved difficult as our song has many different beats.

 Below, I have made a screen-cast using screencast-o-matic explaining how I used Blogger in terms of mostly planning and research but also exploring evaluation. Enjoy :) P.S, it is quite a long video, so please bare with me :) Turn your volume up!!

Now, obviously blogger wasn't all what I used. Here is another screen cast of me explaining everything else such as how I used the internet to help me with my planning, research and evaluation :

Sorry the video cut off, but this video basically explained how I used media technologies and all the programs I used in terms of planning, research evaluation, etc.

Until then!

Stephanie