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

Media technologies influenced various parts of my coursework a significant amount and in a number of different ways and I wouldn't have been able to achieved what I have done without them. The website I used to publish my research, ancillaries and other aspects of my coursework was 'www.blogger.com'. I knew it was a legitimate and trustworthy website as it had been referred to me through several teachers and I'd also used it in the past for personal use. The blog allowed me to practically everything I needed to and was a great way to display the research I had carried out and discuss the decisions I had to make when creating my final product and ancillaries, etc. The fact that it had a feature that allowed you to upload images and videos too was very helpful and I took advantage of the pleasure to quite an extent. It wasn't just the Blogger website that I used the Internet for however, it was highly beneficial for my research and I used a number of websites relative to my topic/genre in order to collate it all together. Some of these included: 'NME.com' and 'www.rollingstone.com'. At first, video streaming websites such as YouTube and Vimeo were great too as I used them to look at music videos of previous A-Level students in order to try and get an idea of what I wanted to create and perhaps what genre I wanted to focus on. YouTube was also very useful towards to end of my project as I used it to upload my music video after completion. It was a good decision to use YouTube over other similar websites to stream my music video in my opinion as it's without a doubt the most popular and I found that my target audience primarily go to YouTube to look for music videos too. Also, with the advancement of Web 2.0 technologies, YouTube is now accessible on a number of different gadgets making my music video available to people on the go with android mobile phone, iPad's and other similar devices.

Other websites that were very important when completing my coursework were social networking websites Facebook and YouTube as well as emailing service Outlook. I used both Outlook and Twitter to contact the artist the artist to get permission to whether I could use the song for the music video which unfortunately I never got a reply to. As for Facebook, it was imperative for a number of different reasons. Essentially, I used it to get in contact with my target audience by creating an online questionnaire through one of it's Apps and specifically inviting different people to take part in answering the questions. Facebook was used to promote my video too. After I upload it to YouTube I shared it with my friends to watch and give me feedback, this helped increase the views and gave me ideas of where I'd gone right and wrong. A website called 'Prezi' was helpful too. It let me put text and pictures into an animated interactive presentation rather than just a blog post which gave the blog a bit of variety. 

I didn't just use media technologies for research and implementing different features into my blog but during the process of creating the film too. Originally, I planned on using the camera on my iPhone 5 to film my music video after being provided with a special tripod made specifically for smartphones. However, my teacher gave me permission to use one of the Media Studies department's video cameras and I decided to take him up on the offered in order to improve the overall quality of my final product.  The camera I used was a 'Fujifilm finepix', it was a great camera and gave the final product a much more genuine and authentic look to it in my opinion. Before actually going out to film the shots for my video, I tested the camera by filming and taking various different images around the house and garden. I then took these shots to Final Cut Pro X on the Mac computer and practiced editing them to get an idea of how to use the software before edited the final footage. At this point and when it came to the final editing itself, Final Cut Pro allowed me to use it's different features and techniques that aren't available on other editing software's and I generally found it easier to use than Windows Movie Maker after past experiences. 

In my opinion, after completing my coursework and evaluating the different media technologies I used throughout I personally believe the most effective and important was the camera equipment and editing software. It gave me the ability to make the music video look genuine and realistic and I feel that without it my final product wouldn't have looked like it did.