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We attached the camera to a tripod when filming the static shots, this was advantageous as it provided us with a stable filming platform.

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We used a Sony HD Camcorder to shoot our music video, apart from when we had to improvise with Sarah's Ipad after the cameras battery died, however we didn't end up using this footage. The camera is very easy to use with a manual zoom which is useful for the more difficult shots and angles. It also effortlessly connected to the tripod which helped us switch from tripod to manual within the same take. However the quality of the camera footage is poor, especially when the lighting is dull. We had great difficulty with this aspect as most of our scene are set inside with artificial dull lighting, but we came to the conclusion it was worth loosing some quality in order to maintaining the right ambiance of the scenes.

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To edit our music video we had the choice between using IMovie and Final Cut Pro X. As we all had experience with both tools we easily came to the conclusion that using Final Cut would be much more fitting for our need. This is because IMovie lack many advanced features, for example depth of layering, multicamera scene sync and background processing. We did many activities in order to become formiliar with Final Cut, this included a tutorial lesson, breaking down into small groups and becoming an expert in a specific skills (e.g. green screen, framing, colour manipulation) in order to teach other groups, and we also used Youtube tutorials when we struggled with a specific new skill. The features of Final Cut that I found most effective are; transition effects i.e. blackouts in between the jump cuts in the fight scene, visual effects i.e. 'cold steel' was the effect we used to reduce the colour intensity in the early scenes (the drained colour mirrors Molly's drained emotions), clip trimming i.e. editing to the beat, and text i.e. this allowed us to layer the song title and artist name over the footage. There were only a couple of disadvantages of using this advanced software, for example there is so many aspects of the program which makes it a little difficult to find a tool that you haven't used before. However it is easily locatable by following a Youtube tutorial. The only other problem I encountered with Final Cut is that is it saves automatically, you'd think this would be a positive feature but I would very much prefer to save my work myself before exiting and not have to worry about it not being there when I return. I have lost my work a couple of times as a result of this, which is very frustrating and easily avoidable if only there was a manual saving system.

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Question 4
I am happy with my choice of Padlet for this question as I was able to personalise the background  (bricks to show the building blocks of learning to use the technologies) and embed clips and images. It has also allowed me to create whatever layout I wish. This is the technology that requires the least skill however I believe I've shown a variety of skills when you bring all the evaluation questions together. For example, recording on Quicktime, editing a podcast, embedding clips and stills and creating a fun interactive media experience.

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Question 3

Glogster was an effective media technology for this question as we were able to present our audience feedback and recordings in a creative way (i.e.place the footage in a laptop screen as seen in the picture to the side). We used Quicktime to record the audience watching our drafts, this was very easy to use and extremly effective for the job as we could play our music video on the sceen and record them at the same time. We chose to start from scratch for this presentation as none of the templates fitted with our image of the final product, this was still reasonable simple to use. Glogester is my least favourite media technology as it's very slow to load and seems to be hypersensitive with grabbing text by accident and moving it.

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Question 2
Joe and I did this question as a pair as we made the auxiliary tasks together, therefore it made sense to evaluate them together also. We've presented it in the form of a video podcast so we can show example screenshots of each specific sections we're talking about. We edited the footage on Final Cut Pro X as we already knew how to use this effectively from editing our music video. We filmed the podcast on the Mac webcam as it saved straight onto the desktop which meant there was no faff uploading the footage.

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Question 1
We used a Prezi for the first evaluation question as we had lots of experience with it therefore knew we could embed our auxiliary tasks, and analyse how effective they are. I think Prezi is a good media technology because it gives a lot of control to the user, rather than restricting the construction (e.g. Powerpoint). I particulary liked the feature of changing the pathway, this allowed us to add in another page by pushing the order of the other pages back one. Prezi had been my favourite presentation method from the beginning of last year, this is because it's straightforward to use, however still has the option to use complex editing techniques (for example starting from scratch rather than using a template).

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This task allowed us to experiment with many editing techniques, for example, colour manipulation, green screen, key framing and split screen. We found some of these skills very effective, e.g. colour manipulation helps to emphasise emotions. But others had the opposite effect, e.g. green screen was very difficult to make it look realistic. As our actual product is very serious we decided it was unwise to risk adding any unwanted comical value but incoperating green screening.

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The use of a tripod when filming was useful practise as it's very important for the stability and range of angles of the shots.

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We used the schools HD cameras when filming the preliminary task. An advantage of this was being able to was being able to watch the footage straight away at the location which enebled us to decided if we needed more takes. A disadvantage of these cameras is that when extorted from final cut onto YouTube the quality was lacking therefore making the whole video seem much less proffessinal. We wanted would have liked to use better cameras for the real product however we were unable to access anything suitable.

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We knew we wanted to use final cut pro even before we started our preliminary task. As we'd used both IMovie and final cut last year we'd all formed a preference for final cut as it provides so many more opportunities, e.g allows many more layers which creates the picture in picture effect. And has a more aesthetically pleasing layout.

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The preliminary task helped when creating our music video in countless ways. For example we were able to experiment with conventions and representations within music videos - we liked the idea of the male being a 'bad guy' so much from this task that we decided to use it in our actial product.

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Blogger enabled me to embed other media softwear into a post which showed my ability to use a range of media technologies.

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Being able to access blogger on my phone, laptop and apple mac was very useful as I could add to my posts on the go as well as in lessons. Therefore if I had an idea out of school hours I could explore it straight away rather than having to wait until my next lesson. This was also beneficial for using blogger for diary entries to show my progression in filming and editing.

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It also allowed me to present my work to not only my peers but the public too. This is particularly helpful when in the audience research stage as my target audience includes the public, therefore my findings will be representative of the correct audience.

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This was an effective form of media soft wear for many reasons, for example it allowed me to link my posts by labels. This is useful for looking back at my research when making decisions about my products.

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Having the use of photoshop for our auxiliary tasks was extremely helpful. An advantage of using it was the incredible high professional standard that it brought. The large range of tools was also a great benefit, for example lassoing, cropping, colour manipulation, layering drawing onto the image. We particularly made use of this last effect in our digi-pack by creating a signature for Molly so that her album artwork was a signed copy (as seen in the picture below). Another useful feature of Photoshop is the ability to select specific sections of the photo (using the magnetic lasso tool, this can be quite time consuming however with a little patience can have an impressive outcome. For example Joe and I used the picture below for our digi-pack, however for the CD art we cut Molly out of this picture and layered it over the top of a countryside landscape. Linking layers was also very effective, for example we used this to group the signature (as seen below) with the album art so that it couldn't be accidently moved or deleted.

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I enjoyed using Wix to create our website as it was simple to use and enabled me to create synergy through embedding our other auxiliary task and music video.  We had a little trouble at the start with the templates as we couldn't find one that fitted our theme so we decided not to use a template. It wasn't long before we ran into many other obstacles and after a few hours realised it was even more difficult to create our theme from nothing. Therefore in the end we found a fairly plain template and added our own ideas to it. The website creator was fairly simple to use and enabled us to link the command buttons (e.g. 'Home' 'Music') to the specific pages.

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This media technology was beneficial as it is an international product therefore allowed us to broaden our target audience to outside the UK. It was very easy to create a survey and share it on multiple social media sites to increase our response numbers.

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I found Prezi to be one of my favourite media technologies to present my ideas through. This is because it's reasonably straight forward to use as well as allowing me to embed clips and pics to help make my point. I really liked how you can start a Prezi from scratch without any template so I could create a pathway that emphasised my ideas.

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The social media was very useful in both the research and construction stage of this project. In particular I used YouTube - for online tutorials when editing, when researching proffessinoal videos and  to export the product. I used Facebook and Twitter - for audience feedback and to see which music videos were tending and why.

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I was able to access final cut pro on the macs which was very useful as this technology is very advanced. I was also able to screen garb specific sections of the screen when providing evidence for my blogger posts, which enabled my to clearly keep track of my progress. Unfortunately during the filming of the dance section the, camera stopped working. However as Sarah had her Ipad with her we decided to film it on that. If the quality was obviously different to the other scenes, then we would just use it as a reference to the choreography before re-filming. Fortunately the Ipad has a 0.7MP camera which left the footage looking less pixelated then when we used the camera.

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This was my primary source when in my research stage as it has an unlimited amount of information therefore I could gain a good understanding of conventions, which I then went on to use in my music video. An example of this is I noticed a common representation of males having the power, so we decided to include this in our video.

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