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

We used a range of new media technologies, including hardware, software and websites, at every stage in the process of making our music video, album cover and website. These technologies were essential for the construction of our three artefacts and the communication within my group at every stage of the project.

Research and Planning
During this stage, one of the most useful technologies we used was web 2.0. The Prezi below explains how we used this.

Another technology we used at this stage was Adobe Premiere Pro. We used this software to make our Steal-O-Matic, which is a collection of our influences and references, and our Animatic, which serves a similar purpose to a storyboard. We all had previous experience using the program, and so we worked quickly and efficiently when using it.

It was incredibly useful to be able to lay out all our references in the steal-o-matic into a linear timeline that we could either play all the way through to get a sense of the overall look we were going to create, or jump to particular clips to refer to our influences for set design, costume, shot style, etc.

Editing the Steal-O-Matic

Our steal-o-matic:

When editing the real music video, it was extremely useful to be able to use the animatic as a reference on the same timeline, which we could do as we edited the final video in the same program.

Editing the Animatic

Our animatic:

Construction

We used a range of software during the construction stage of our project. To edit the music video we used Adobe Premiere Pro, to create the digipak we used Photoshop, and to create the website we used Wix. 



Wix is the online software we used to build the website. There were many advantages of using this program, such as the ease of use. However, there were also some disadvantages to using this program. This mindmap goes into more detail about these:

Mind Map created by d08mamac with GoConqr

We also used a range of hardware in the studio and on location. Molly, Ellie and I worked together to make these videos, to explain which digital technologies we used in the studio and on location during production, how we used it, and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Our use of cameras during production:

Our use of the lighting technology in the studio:

Evaluation

I used Blogger to post the answers to my evaluation. Blogger has several features that were particularly useful at this stage in the project.








For example, it allows the user to embed interactive media such as YouTube videos and Prezis. Here is an example of where I have embedded a YouTube video into the html code of one of my blog posts:

This helped me to make the content of my blog posts more engaging as it contained interactive ways of presenting information, such as 'Padlets' to scroll through or YouTube videos to watch. 

Blogger also plays GIFs, which in many instances made it easy to explain and demonstrate the points I was making, such as illustrating the link between the song 'My Head is a Jungle' and the visuals of our video. For this, I was able to insert a GIF I made into one of my posts:

Due to Blogger being online, I was sable to edit from any computer or from my smartphone with the Blogger app, making it a convenient and portable platform. These screenshots show the layout of the app, which was useful at one point during the evaluation stage when my WiFi wasn't working and I could access Blogger via the app using 3G on my phone.

Despite Blogger containing many features that were beneficial to my evaluation, it has crashed on occasion during this project, causing me to lose work. This proved to be quite frustrating as a lot of the work was very time-consuming and could not be recovered. However, the pros of this online technology outweigh the cons, and therefore I feel that Blogger was an extremely valuable technology at this stage of the project.


I used webtools throughout my evaluation to present the content of my answers in a creative and engaging way. Here are some of the tools that I used, and the advantages and disadvantages of each:

Created with Padlet

Although I feel that many of the webtools I used were time-consuming to create, they benefited the overall standard of my evaluation answers by making the information either clearer or laid out in a more interesting way, making it more engaging. Therefore I feel that they were an extremely useful technology in this stage of the project.

We used a range media technologies to our advantage throughout the project, making productive use of everything we had available to us. Despite several of these technologies having their downsides, this project would have been much more difficult without them available to us. For example, without the ability to instantly communicate with each other the planning of our project would have been done less efficiently, and without the high quality of image the cameras produced, our music video would not look nearly as professional. For these reasons, I recognise that the technologies we used have been greatly beneficial at each stage of the process of producing our music video, album cover and website.