Evaluation question 4 Final Draft

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

Throughout the entire project I used a huge variety of media technologies to end up with my final products.

When doing the research and planning many different media technologies were used. Survey Monkey was an extremely helpful was of finding out more about about our target audience and what they wanted from our video and most of the ideas for our construction was based around this audience research. Youtube was also very helpful as we would use it to watch videos by artists of the similar genre to analyse and get a good idea of the codes and conventions that we should have included in our video. Another helpful media technology was a website called Prezi. This helped me present my findings when researching and planning and was easy to refer back to when constructing. I also used Prezi to present the analysis of a music video by Lily Allen and the results from a survey I constructed on Survey Monkey.

When constructing the video, we used a huge variety of soft wear and hard wear to achieve what we wanted. For example, we used cameras, a tripod and an Apple Mac computer and learnt how to use them in much more depth than in AS. We also used Final Cut Pro to edit the video which was very important for the final outcome of the video as the soft wear was very professional and allowed us to achieve exactly what we wanted- for example we were able to change the lighting in order to improve the continuity of the video as different scenes were filmed at different times of the day.

When constructing the magazine advert the main program I used was Serif PagePlus X6. This program was extremely helpful as it allowed me to do everything I wanted and I was very pleased with the final outcome. Whilst constructing the magazine advert I also used Serif PhotoPlus X5. I used this soft wear to edit the main photo I used as the album cover for my advert.

When constructing the website, the program I used to do so was Wix. This website was very useful as it allowed me to choose my template and gave me a lot of freedom in order to achieve the image I had in my head when initially starting the project. I found that this website had a good variety of options in fonts, colours, templates and optional features for the website such as a photo gallery. I also found this website very user friendly and I'm very happy with the final outcome of the website.

When evaluating I wanted to try some different programs to use in order to expand my knowledge in media technologies. I tried to use a website called Powtoon but I found it didn't allow me to do what I wanted and didn't give me much freedom in terms of changing text box sizes and adding images etc. so I went back to Prezi and I'm pleased with the outcome. I also used Microsoft PowerPoint for one of my evaluation questions. I wanted to make a poster and felt that that was the best way about it as I was familiar with the program and it allowed me to do exactly what I wanted.

I have made a big progression from AS to A2 as I have learnt how to use a larger range of software products and also learnt about them and how to use them in more depth in order to improve the outcome of my final products and present my research and evaluation.