Evaluation, Question Four

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

Due to the revolution of web 2.0 we were able to use the internet as a main source of research. During our research and planning stages, one of the media technologies we used was streaming site - YouTube. YouTube allowed us to view a broad range of real media texts, and get a feel for different styles and genres. It gave us a lot of inspiration and ideas toward the designing and making of our product. We gained a good idea of what our target audience liked/disliked from groups, channels, and comments that they were participating in and we began to visualise ideas for our video.Videos on YouTube that gave us inspiration to include stop motion animation within our product include:

Incomplete lullaby- Lisa Mitchell
Paralyzed – The Used
Amazon Kindle Commercial 1
Deerhunter – Famous last words

We felt that animation was so original and we were intrigued to learn the skills behind it. We used email to contact the creators of stop motion videos over the web, who in response gave us great advice and tips. We could also watch tutorial videos online that would teach us the essentials to animating.

Social networking sites 'myspace' and 'facebook' allowed us to research established bands or artists that were popular with our target audience. We could get an aiming point for the style, genre and image that our target audience like and what expectations they have from these artists. Social networking sites were really useful to us during researchOverall I would say that the internet played a huge main part in our planning and research stages and without it our research would be much more limited to resources such as television and magazines.

We used search engine; Google to search for promotional posters and CD covers across the net. This gave us easy access to existing media products in which we could carry out research for our ancillary task. We also used a scanner to scan in existing CD covers and posters that we had found that we wanted to transfer onto our Blogs. This was useful for comparing and analysing each one and carrying out further research.

During the construction of our video, we mainly used a video camera. This task was the first time I have ever used a video camera so my skills were basic, but developing every week. I learned how to use tools to create different effects with the camera, for example a tripod and dolly, or handheld camera movement. I learned how to frame a shot well and light a studio appropriately. For our animation scenes we used a still SLR pentax camera to take a number of frames that we could create into a video clip using iPhoto. I already have skills with a still camera from AS coursework, but doing stop motion animation has increased my knowledge and allowed me to solve problems. We used the still camera to take location shots, and carry out a photo shoot for our ancillary task.

Location Shots for Music Video


We were able to display our photoshoots in an attractive manor by using Adobe photoshop CS4 to create a contact sheet. This is advantageous because it displays all of the photos on one page in a fashionable and presentable way.

We used a mobile phone to play our track (1234) whilst we were filming the outside scenes to help us keep in time. This was very useful as the mobile phone was portable, had sufficient battery power and was loud enough for the camera to pick up the music over other unwanted sounds. We used a 'Nokia express Music' phone which is especially designed for playing music and suited our needs perfectly.

To edit our product, we used apple software; iMovie and Final cut express. Originally we put our raw footage into iMovie to create a basic sequence and order. When we wanted to really be picky and carry out detailed editing we used final cut express. Final cut allowed us to correct mistakes and solve problems we had made during filming due to it's very acurate precision editing. Websites such as 'dafont.com' allowed us to include graphics and interesting fonts of text within our anciallary tasks that would appeal to our audience.

The main new media technology that has benifitted our project is blogger. Blogger has allowed us to record our progress with dates and times, so we can present all of our work in one place and annotate it for our target audience to understand. We can upload videos, photos, links and tags using blogger, and even embed microsoft word, powerpoint or excel documents using websites such as Scribd.