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

The Blogger service is what we used to construct our online blog about our music video. The service is easy to use and we were able to input all our research which we built up to the blog. We were also very familiar with the concept of the blog and how it worked because we used it last year during our coursework at AS- Level. The blog automatically saves all our information at certain times while we are on the blog and we could relate back to it during the preperation of our video. Blogger made it much easier for us to save our work as it did not fill up our hardrive and automatically saves our posts. We would definitely use this software for future projects as it is easy and reliable to use.

The software we used to make our video was 'Final Cut Pro x' which is exclusively a Mac editing software. We were able to input professional effects and transitions using this software. It allowed us to make well timed cuts so our music video flowed well with the beat of the song. This software also helped when coming to the lighting of certain scenes, for example one of our clips were too dark and this software let us change the brightness and contrast of this clip in order to make it more visable. As some of our scenes were flashbacks they needed to be noticably different from the rest of the video, this software allowed us to use black and white effects and blur effects to emphasise the flashbacks and therefore give the full effect of them. This software was user friendly and easy to use, however we felt as if there was a lack of good quality effects and transitions within the programme.

To research alot of other music videos we used online software such as YouTube and Vimeo. Via the website "Vimeo", we were able to look at other media A2 students videos from not only within our class but other A2 students and learn from their ideas. As well as student videos, we found looking at professional videos of real and professional artists which gave us ideas of different effects to use, which would look good in our film. Looking at other videos of the same genre as ours which is mainly electronic music (more specifically dubstep) we found that most of these songs change scene with the beat of the song so we used this when coming to the editing of our video. YouTube gave us a chance to look at past students work and also upload our own video on the site in order to get feedback from the public.

The camera we used was our teachers Nikon 550 HD camera. We used this for taking the shots for our CD covers and poster/advert. We have never used this piece of equipment before hand but we found this camera extremely easy to use and function and it produced high quality pictures, which however were ruined a but when it was uploaded onto photoshop and they became slightly distorted and blurred.

To film our project we used Panasonic Standard definition cameras. Although these were not high quality as we would have liked we made do and were able to get some good quality shots for our video. We were familiar with this camera due to the fact as mentioned before that we have used this piece of equipment last year in our AS-level coursework.

The other piece of software which we used was Adobe Photoshop CS5 . Photoshop allowed us to alter the contrast of our images and insert text and images to make them look more professional and to the best of which we can make them including the digi pak and poster. Our skills in photoshop have definitely benifitted and improved from using photoshop as me or my partner have really used it before and therefore found it difficult to use at the beginning of the task but after a bit of practice we were happy with using the software and got to grips with it fairly rapidly.

Each of these programmes, hardware and pieces of equipment has given us more skills in the editing process aswell as general comuting abilites. We are happy with all of the equipment which we used and have found these as a great help to the creation and development to our media coursework.