HOW DID YOU USE NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION, RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

Youtube
Youtube is an online streaming website which allows anybody to make a video which can be delivered to a mass an audience. This within itself is very postmodern as it removes the distinction between both the professional director and the 17 year old boy sat in his bedroom, editing a new video that attracts a 200 views or 20,000. People now use Youtube as a career as both people gaining money by making videos on their own or belonging to a bigger company using Youtube as just a platform to punlish their product.

In terms of the area I am studying, Youtube is very effective for publishing music videos for both young bands with no connections to massive bands on major record labels. I learnt this from my own experience when I joined a band a long time ago and we decided to record a cover of a song we really like; even though it was terrible it gained about 1,000 views due to the amount of effort we put into spreading it around web 2.0 and social media. We also tagged this video as a response the original video making fans of the band come to watch our version. One thing I learned from this experience was the way a mass audience are totally honest, we quickly got lots of negative comments as both of us were rubbish at what we were doing back then. Because we received these comments we were able to asses ourselves until we got it right.

This was similar to the process in terms of creating our main media product. We would use Youtube to share test shots, storyboards and drafts. This allowed an audience of both teachers/students who are working on the course and a mass audience who can provide an unprofessional opinion. As our demographic mostly catered for unprofessional, young teenagers, we valued their opinion over opinions from our teachers who did not meet our demographic and had a professional eye to the media texts.

Youtube was also very effective when identifying conventions of both form and genre. As I am already a big fan of the pop-rock genre, I was already aware of bands which fit in this genre such as bands like Kids in Glass Houses, Mallory Knox and The Maine. But using Youtube to watch their music videos allowed me to discover further as the website uses a 'suggestions' section which introduced me to bands  I have not heard of but who still fit in my genre. This allowed me to study further into the conventions making my results more valid and up to date.

Photoshop

Photoshop is a still image manipulation program which is used both professionally and unprofessionally. It is used to make from movie posters to editing spots out of your next Facebook profile picture. My Photoshop skills were clearly enhanced when making my product in my foundation portfolio. But I had never used the program to create a full digipack. Although I already had some experience making an A4 advert in my foundation portfolio.

Making the digipack required me to work in different sizes and different aspect ratios which I had never worked with before which made things very complicated when constructing the finished piece. As I used photos that already had filters on them, there was not a lot of messing with the photos to make them nicer; it was mostly making sure the text worked with the artwork making it both conventional and accessible. So I spent a lot of time on dafont.com finding the right font for my ancillary texts.

Overall, Photoshop was a very influential piece of technology due to its professional look and its easy to use workspace (when you have learned to use it).

Samsung MV900F

When shooting the moving image, we used a Samsung camera to film the actors. This was new territory for both me and Joe which resulted in some very bad test shots.

After a reviewing the footage we learned that we need a tripod to make sure the camera was focused and we learned our location was not suitable due its size and lighting. Out progress with the camera clearly progressed as we started experimenting with different camera framing and angles. These new shots did not match our story board as we realised the story board did not make sense.

iPhone 4s

I used this more or less every day throughout the course. Through the proliferation and miniaturization of new media technologies, mobile phones are playing a bigger role in today's society. I used my phone when walking about and when I found a location I could just take a photo and upload it straight to my blog via the Blogger app there and then. I also used it to take photos for my ancillary texts; although the quality was somewhat bad in comparison to those taken on a camera, it was a much easier and more accessible process.


Here's me saying the same stuff in less detail and stuttering a lot.