Evaluation question 4 - Etienne

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

During the production stages of our media products our main equipment was the Canon EOS 650 camera which was used in things like our video making and taking photos for our print products e.g leaflets, covers, posters.

It's use was essential to our group as without it we wouldn't have been able to get the high quality and noise-free recordings, and the functionality is better comparable to something like a handheld camera. Using the camera puts us in a more creative position and puts us in the role of the director and the cinematogropher, as it allows us to choose how we want to frame a shot entirely. We could experiment with our shots and choose creative ways to film e.g wall mounted and pov shots.

We already have a years worth of experience from watching youtube videos and learning how to use the camera through the AS preliminary work we did last year. Furthermore it's very customisable which could possibly be a downside to people that are new to DSLRS however its user friendly to people which have experience with DSLRS already. It's low battery life and fragility meant we had to be careful when we were handling it in order to not break it. Initially, when filming our first take for the musical performances our battery ended up dying as a result we had to return to later get all the takes we needed. On our next recording we had two back up batteries in order not to slow down our progress.

Blogger

An essential part of our research is the website blogger. It's an online social media platform that allows users to post images, text and videos. The functions it included was essential to my group as we used it to get things like case-studies and also to have a convergence point where we could re-direct our audiences to things like youtube and social media websites. Our advantage with blogger is that we had one years worth of experience using it from our As coursework which meant it's familiarity made it easier to get the blog exactly how we wanted it with our decorations and our embeddings. It has a learning curve but it is not steep enough to deter new users but rather encourages them to look for more creative designs and posting methods for example we used another embedded link from a different website to get slideshows on our blog. A disadvantage of Blogger was the fact that glitches sometimes meant our work often got deleted by accident or not posted at all.

Prezi

Prezi is a website that my group used for our 3 music video research including contemporary, controversial and seminal videos. It doesn't include any paid firewalls unlike Microsoft power point which meant my whole group could use it. Furthermore it was easy to embed it into my blog whenever I wanted but sometimes the links didn't work and required me to goto the website to open them up which is a massive detriment as its ease of access was meant to be the main selling. We used it to create our posters by importing the pictures, colour correcting, then putting fonts over it. We then exported to photoshop to make fine edits.

Imacs

The iMacs were also an essential part of our groups equipment as without it a-lot of the software wouldn't be accessible to us. It's quick and easy to navigate  UI allowed us to work diligently and be able to have our work laid out in a clear unobtrusive way. We have been used to them since last year and also some of us have them at home meaning we are able to work on our projects in more than one setting. The biggest disadvantage is that most of us were used to windows based OS so the mac OS was very new to us initially and we had to re-learn things like key commands.

Adobe photoshop

Adobe photoshop was a key part in our digi-pack production phase. It's a photo editing software and It has a very steep learning curve meaning those who aren't used to it would've struggled. We had to google youtube tutorials in order to understand what we were doing, and often the software was very unforgiving as it does exactly what you want it to and if you didn't know what you were doing you often ruined your own work. Which for those adept at it would be better accustomed to, but beginners would often be frustrated with it. After spending a few months with the software we gained insight by google tutorials and spending time after class to develop our work.

Canva

 The website canva was used in conjunction with photoshop as it came with a number of preloaded fonts and styles which we used heavily to plan our digipacks then imported unto photoshop to make final edits. It's mostly free however some of the premium styles cost a-lot and were usually better. It's an essential part of our production phase, as our print products included fonts from the website.

Final cut pro 

 Final cut pro was another essential part of our software use. It's a video editing software which includes editing and pre-made transitions. It was very user friendly and came loaded with many diegetic sounds which made it easier to work with. It's drag and drop feature is very beginner friendly and mostly all we used. We have had a long amount of experience with it since our As preliminary phase, were we learnt about things like cuts and edit to make our videos seem more proffesional. We sometimes ended up accidentally deleting all our work but usually we came back with a better video in the end. We used it when cutting together many of the scenes and it has a feature where we can upload it straight to youtube. but a disadvantage is the massive lag that occurs which could be workable if the software allowed mp3 bouncing however it doesn't.

Soundcloud

 Soundcloud is an audio sharing platform, we used the website to share  audio files from audience feed back and also to upload evaluations. It also had private and embeddable links which we used heavily on our blogs.