Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stage?

Construction:

The advancements in technology have altered the way that I constructed and produced media products, one of the key changes to the industry caused by technological advancements is that of products construction. The technological improvements with editing software and cameras being the most important aspects.

The cameras used on the music videos are a vast improvement from those used on our previous thriller productions, the major difference here being the quality of the footage. The new HD Digital Cameras were able to record far more detail than the previous equipment, this allowed us to explore darker and locations and shots which had previously caused the footage to blur or lose focus. This severely improved the planning of the production and allowed us to utilise several high angle shots and zooms which would not have been possible without the technological advancements towards the media. Another improvement to the camera software was the fact that the footage was recorded onto an SD Card rather than straight to video, this allowed us to easily rewind and view footage without the fear of recording over previous footage. When comparing the HD digital cameras used in our media production to the 16mm film stock that were originally used in film productions the perks of the technological advancements become clear, the easy accessibility and playback ability have allowed the production of our music video to be much smoother and efficient than ever before.

When editing our raw footage we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 in order to construct our music video, this allowed the edition of effects and colour saturation which had previously not been a possibility, the use of such effects helped confirm generic conventions such as the 'circular iris' utilised at the beginning and end of the production, this helped confirm the generic opening to silent film, which without certain advantages to media technologies would not have been a possibility.

Another key piece of software is Adobe Photoshop, which allowed me to render and edit my print productions in a way that previous software had not, this allowed me to cut and edit several images that related to our Music Video into one single shot, this allowed me to confirm the idea that our protagonist was in a 'wonderland' without having to find a specific location that would create the same effect.

Planning and Research:

One of the key media technologies used throughout the planning of my media production was blogger, which allowed me to organise separate aspects of the planning process whilst being able to visibly link specific ideas to research into other music videos, it also allows the presentation of planning and evaluation to be easily visible to our media teachers which in turn allows feedback to be quickly obtained and worked upon, without the technological advancements which led to the blogging process, the presentation of my planning, evaluation and research would have caused the disruption of the actual production of the Music Video.
YouTube was a key feature of my research into the genre and other music videos, without easily accessible videos such as the early footage of the 1903 Alice in Wonderland the ability to present generic conventions and certain connotations would not have been a possibility.
Another key advance is that of Google as a whole, without the easily accessible web pages the locating and presenting of ideas would have rendered the blogs rather irrelevant, the ability to easily access hundreds of images to display and idea has allowed the planning and research of the music videos to become a smoother process than in previous years.

Evaluation:

The key advancements in media technologies that have helped improve the construction, research and planning of media productions are the advances made on the internet, without sites such as 'Blogger' the presentation of my research would not have been as influential towards my planning and the final construction of the music video. With all the information around my own production organised on the same screen as the planning I was able to greatly improve my overall production. As well as blogger, YouTube and Google allowed me to display all the ideas and theories around the media production in an easy to understand format which allowed me to easily obtain feedback which in turn allowed the production to strengthen. Without such improvements into this software the process at which I made my Media product would have been far more time consuming and would of resulted in a less appealing end product. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that the advancements in media technologies has positively improved the ability to construct and produce media products.