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

In terms of media technologies, particularly digital technology, I feel there has been an advancement over the two year course. This year has introduced me to some new technologies, acquiring new skills as well as developing existing ones.

Initially, with regards to research and planning, digital media has allowed me to be more thorough whilst investigating existing products for my music video. For example, the 24 hour music channels such as Viva and 4music enabled me to analyse conventions and styles of music videos as well as the Internet, exploiting sites such as YouTube for existing videos and people’s personal creative projects, really helped me to gain an understanding of what to include in my music video and how to include it. The use of Blogger for this blog, was particularly significant in aiding my research and planning, where I utilised all the features to my advantage such as adding hyperlinks and embedding videos, images and PDF files.

For the actual filming of our music video, we used a Panasonic HD Ready Camera, that is actually my dads, as we had a huge amount of problems with the school camera we used for our AS media film. We decided to use this camera as the picture quality is extremely clear, it came with a good, steady tri-pod,  the editing program supports the camera and most importantly, the battery life was very good (which was the main problem we had last year)!

The editing program we decided to use was Cyberlink PowerDirector, as we used this editing program for our AS film and therefore we already had a good understanding of how it worked. Although, we went onto the website to watch tutorials which helped us to gain a much further understanding of the editing programme and therefore helped to us with the editing process and enabled us to use more advanced editing skills for our music video. I feel deploying these new skills drastically enhanced the overall outcome of the video, increasing production values enormously.

As well as this, Photoshop CS3 played an important part in the development of my ancillary products, enabling me to create a very abstract and interesting image, from photo-manipulation, using an array of different image adjustments and filters. Without this, the designs would not nearly have looked as professional, abstract and interesting and therefore been less effective as real media texts.
Altogether the advance in media and digital technology this year for advanced portfolio has been huge, and has allowed me to be more flexible in my creative decision making, exploring new concept and ideas and successfully pursuing them.