EVALUATION - How I used media technologies to construct, research, plan and evaluate

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

During this project I have used a wide range of media technologies during my stages of construction and research, planning and evaluation.

Research
The internet played a big part of my research stage because this enabled me to research a variety of media products to help me to plan and construct my ancillary tasks.

For my website I researched into several music websites to establish their typical conventions as my website will need to develop and use these conventions to ensure it was suitable for its purpose. The majority of them were alternative rock band websites as Kings of Leon are this genre, therefore my website needed to fulfil the conventions of this music genre.

These are some of the websites that I used for my research:

http://www.kingsofleon.com/
http://www.kasabian.co.uk/gb/home/
http://muse.mu/

Construction

For the construction of my ancillary tasks I have used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Dreamweaver. For each of my ancillary task I have used Adobe Photoshop to edit my images which I have then imported into the other software to create my products. For example, the image I have included on my bus advert I originally edited in Photoshop. I used Photoshop to crop the image, alter the brightness and contrast and change the auto levels of the image.

Another example of combining the software’s together was when I edited my image for the header of my website by removing its background and changing it to black. I edited this background to go with my background colour of my header.

I also used Adobe Flash to create my slideshow for my website. However to create my slideshow in Adobe Flash I used Adobe Photoshop to create the three different images. Once I created these images I imported them into Adobe Flash and converted them into movie clips to create my slideshow. By exporting this media I could import into Adobe Dreamweaver. By using the three software’s together I was able to create the slideshow for my website.

Adobe Photoshop:

Adobe Flash:

Planning

Evaluation

For the planning process of my project I used Microsoft Word to create computer sketches of my final designs as by using this they would be much more accurate and detailed. In addition, I used Adobe Photoshop to edit some of the images in order to gain an idea of what they will look like with my design. This enabled me to identify which colours I could use which will match the style of the images. 

For my evaluation I have used Blogger to upload videos and to post blogs to evaluate what I have done throughout this project. By uploading videos I have been able to include interactivity and demonstrate some of the stages throughout my production process. For example, I have uploaded videos which show me and the rest of my group filming for our principle photography and a podcast which consists of me talking about the bus advert I have created for my ancillary and comparing it with existing bus adverts. In addition, I have included another video which consists of some of the outtakes from our filming.  

I have also compared shots from our video with existing videos and demonstrated ones that are similar or identical. This is evidence that we have developed these conventions into our main product for this genre and the typical shots found in a typical music video. I have included video links to the video’s I have looked at to undertake this, some of them I have uploaded onto my blog post from YouTube.