Evaluation - Question 4

Question 4:

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

Research:

During the individual research that was carried out before our planning essential website and forms of technology were used to compare, contrast and evaluate other music videos, cd digipacks and websites to make sure the right ideas and inspirations and were collected and researched so that our final product would hopefully sell in the industry. I used YouTube for my analysis of two music videos (Diana Vickers - "The Boy Who Murdered Love" and Natalie Imbruglia "Shiver") and this enabled me to embed the videos on to my blog. This would help me and people reading my blog, because they can then have the video to play and "engage" with which would then increase the understanding of my analysis. Also giving an audience a visual representation to go along side the text will hopefully increase their interest and make them want to be engaged and involved (play button - interactive) with the product and the hypothetical "analysis".

Also for the analysis of the digipack, I used google to get images of CD artwork for "Ellie Goulding" and "Madonna". "Google" has helped me analyse these CD digipacks by providing me with images, which inspired me during my planning process. When using "Google" i filtered my searches quite specifically so that I found what I was looking for. This was quite an easy process and very efficient, however because there are thousands of results, and all different quality, I had to be certain that the specific image was suitable for my analysis.

For the website research I researched "Florence + the Machine"'s site, this was again using "Google" as the search engine. Due to what I searched this site was very easy to find and open, therefore again enabled me to analyse it well. To get the aspects of the site on my blog I had to print screen the website and then crop in Microsoft PowerPoint. I would have made sense to do it in Microsoft Word, however from this programme you could not then right click and save as image. This tool was similar in my music analysis. To enhance audience understanding I print screened the shots I was analysing, this was a time consuming activity, however it was easier for me to discuss knowing images were available to refer to (and remember). Whilst doing this "blogger" allowed me to import pictures, however the format and positions of these pictures were not easy to control. This was a major disadvantage to this blogger site because it increased the time it would take to make a post if you were including pictures. This was very hard and "fiddly", causing the layout of some posts to be "unattractive". This was very frustrating and took up a lot of unproductive time trying to correct.

Planning:

During the planning stage I firstly used a scanner to upload our mind maps and storyboards and uploaded them using blogger. I had the same problem with the importing of photos. However it is easier to prove that these were done and is an easier way to show the work, rather than there being loads of text on a post. I did then analysis and discuss in more depth our ideas in the mind maps, but at least it meant that the audience have other mediums to focus on rather than just "bulks" of text. This also makes the post more attractive and appealing to read. It is easier to type up work on to an electronic blog because you know that it it safe, and at one point we had lost the storyboards/mind maps because they were on paper, luckily we found them, but this problem wasn't evident during our blog posts because it saved automatically and can be transferred on emails if a member of the group was absent. This helps group efficiency and especially in our group, because being absent was quite regular from some people, it helped them to keep connected with the group and "up to speed" with improvements, adjustments and new ideas. Because we had a group of 4, this tool was vital.

Blogger Overall Evaluation

This site, despite it being very difficult and time consuming to upload photos is also very frustrating, in terms of the "hyperlink" section. In terms of "spaces" the compose box doesn't always look exactly how it will appear on your blog, similarly with the "preview" - which you would've thought would be exact version. Now, although it has more "interactive" sections and it is a save way of publishing text, you can also include pictures (more easily) on Microsoft word and print it off with your choice of layout (as long as you back up). Also, in terms of "mistakes" done on "blogger" - there is no "undo" button, for example if you delete something by pressing the "backspace" button to decrease the "line space" and hold it too much it deletes text. This happened last year and I had to re-do whole post. Now "blogger" did allow us to upload YouTube videos/ videos - which was a big help during our research section and also reinforcing our new direction half way through our piece. These filming videos helped show that we had evaluated our progress so far and to be efficient we deleted certain shots from our final library of videos so that when we were editing we didn't have to go through folder of clips.

Video

For this section of production we used a digital video recorder, which at times had its problems. Certain video recorders automatically change the format of the uploaded videos depending on the model. We had a problem with this when we used a different camera, the files which were uploaded from this had a different format when imported to Adobe Premier Pro. I think that Adobe Premier Pro is a very useful and professional piece of software when creating videos, however it put me off initially because it seemed very "difficult to use". I think it could be placed and organised differently on the page. This made me not want to be in charge of editing, due to the fact that it looked "difficult", however towards the middle of the editing process, due to lack of time i decided to try it out, and surprisingly understood what I had to do. The rendering process is very time consuming and uploading to YouTube and took up a lot of our time although we did try our hardest to make good use of this time.

Digipack

For this I used Microsoft PowerPoint to design the several designs of the CD digipack. Because I had used PowerPoint before I felt confident with the layout of the programme and the things that could be done including effects, colours and shapes. This gave us a huge advantage on time management whilst designing this because we didn't have to figure out how to use a programme before we got designing. I think PowerPoint, although can produce unprofessional work, can also transform an image to make it more appealing and "striking". For example the black and white effect on the image made the fairly "normal" picture of Sophie become something that would attract attention in a store.

Website

For this section of production we wasted quite a lot of time because of the "initial thought" of difficulty, this similarly to "Adobe Premier Pro", scared us all because we had to use a programme which we weren't all familiar with. This caused this section of the production to be placed last on our timetable. However this was a bad mistake because this piece of software required us to get help and advice from our teachers and IT specialists so that we could set up the basic website. During the time were cd drafting was in progress I also designed certain website drafts and mock ups on Microsoft PowerPoint so I then made all the shapes, texts and effects in to one picture by grouping them. This was a hassle when inserted into Dreamweaver because it was just an image which no text could be layered over. However we sorted it by importing the picture in to Fireworks and creating different hyperlink sections, then it was easier to scroll over in Dreamweaver. This was initially very confusing, however towards the end I realised that our idea worked and was achievable with the software given.