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

Throughout our A2 project, we had to pick up a few more new media concepts in order to make our work more presentable. As well as using new features of Media we had learnt in the past to make our work much easier, by accessing features that we had never used or considered before. These new features were mainly attained from technologies we had picked up or learned to use at a certain level last year or earlier.

In addition to using Blogger last year, it was essential for us to find, research and evaluate certain music videos of our genre. Thanks to YouTube's diversity of choice it was easier for us to find related videos to what we were originally looking for which really speeded up our research. The related videos meant we we were able to see features of similar videos giving us an indication of what our target audiences preferences were. These were then easily embedded onto our blogs where group members could share videos between each other, such as for us when we had all shared the audio track of "Therapy" on Youtube to take the video off one another.

I had used photobucket for awhile before, but this was the first time I had used it as a separate piece of technology to be used in my media project. In regards to photographs, I had tried to make it more visually appealing by creating various slideshows of the pictures of our locations. It was reasonably easy as all I had to do was upload the pictures to my hard drive and then prepare a slideshow for them, merely dragging which pics I wanted in the slideshow and what theme of transition I wanted to use with them. This is a contrast to how pictures were presented last year for my AS work where simply uploaded to my blog.

We had used Photoshop for the construction of our Digipak & Magazine advertisement. Removing the background to pictures proved the most difficult challenge, as it required learning new skills from a new technology. This was ultimately so we could incorporate our own theme into our products as well as making them look more realistic in terms of real album covers and advertisements.

For the actual making of our music video, we were able to use imovie HD yet again to maximise our professionalism. The technology then allowed us to convert it into a video we could upload to Youtube allowing us to share it with other people and obtaining feedback which allowed us to improve on our overall video. Seeing as this was my second year using imovie, I was a little more adept in my abilities especially around the transitions as I had included various fading techniques such as as he climax of our video as we fade out of Zara and Jordan hugging. As well as experimenting with the titling features allowing us to make more refined productions to put on our blogs.