How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research and planning:
Pros: Google is a web browser and also a simple search engine that allows people to search for anything they want easily and user generated content (Web 2.0) will appear relating to the searched words.We used Google to search for resources, for example: postmordernism, conventions of the hip-hop genre, genre theories, and potential songs that we could use in our music video.
Cons: There was too many irrelevant pieces of information and there was no real way to filter out the irrelevant websites. You have to thoroughly go through each website in order to find the information you want and there was no real way to check the reliability or validity of the information so you had to trust on your intuition and the website itself.
- Blogger
Pros: Blogger is a website that allows anyone to write a blog and post it on the internet. We used Blogger to record our progress for our music video and print work. Furthermore, we could put images, videos, PowerPoints and sound files onto our posts so we could have a variety of content. In terms of research and planning, we used Blogger as a basis to record our research of music videos and audience feedback of said products.
Cons: Blogger is not a good website for beginners, it requires high knowledge of computer science for it to work. Furthermore, it's rather sophisticated for a website for blogging. I would have recommended tumblr because it's much more modern and more suited to beginners. For example, the HTML coding will confuse many beginners who don't know what it is or how it works.
Pros: Facebook is a free social media website that allows people to connect with others on the internet via messaging, sharing photos or videos and playing games with each other. We also all had Facebook on our mobile phones therefore we could sent instant messages to each other outside of school so we could plan and co-ordinate our ideas more efficiently. We used Facebook to promote our surveys and gather audience feedback. We could also share all our images in one place such as our audience feedback results.
Cons: Facebook requires internet therefore not everyone could access it 24/7 on their phones. This caused delays between responses and wasted time. Another con would be that Facebook is not available in school and as a result, we couldn't communicate as effectively.
- YouTube
Pros: Youtube is a free video sharing website that allows users to upload, share and review videos, created by other users (Web 2.0). We mainly used YouTube to research music videos for analysis and reference during our research and planning stage. Another advantage of YouTube is that it's very popular so there are millions of music videos to choose and analyze at our pleasure. Furthermore, YouTube is available on my phone so I could go on it at anytime and research music videos.
Cons: However my phone screen was too small so I could fully analyze the mise en scene of certain music videos at the time.We also faced a similar problem to Google, in that there was no way to filter out irrelevant videos and therefore we had to rely on our experience and intuition mainly. Also YouTube was not available in school so it caused many delays and meant that we could not get advice on whether the video was optimal.
- Powerpoint
Pros: PowerPoint is a service developed by Microsoft as part of Microsoft Office and is a service used by millions of people. We primarily used PowerPoint to record genre theories such as Andrew Goodwin's Features of Music Videos and Steve Neale. The advantages were that we could easily share it in our group and we could use it as a way to diversify our blog posts.
Cons: PowerPoint is not a free service and relies on people already having Microsoft Office installed. Other versions of PowerPoint are severely worse.
- Google Drive
Pros: Google Drive is a free service that allows users to freely share media content to other people they choose to share with. Like Facebook, it's an effective way of sharing digital content outside of school. It's fast, simple and easy to use unlike Blogger. We used Google Drive to share our music video, genre theories and audience feedback data. It's also a much better way of sharing digital content than a memory stick or email because it can hold up to 10GB of data for free.
Cons: It can only 10GB data therefore it has a limited capacity until you have to pay for more so you have to upload wisely. Also it requires people to have Google accounts which was a problem that I had because I had to make one just for this occasion.
- Smartphone
Pros: A smartphone is very useful for communication and going on the internet to use Facebook, Youtube, Blogger, Google Drive etc. We used a smartphone in the research and planning stage to take pictures of our initial ideas of our print work to be used for our audience feedback. I also used my phone to research music videos and print work. Furthermore nearly has a phone so we could communicate as group and share ideas for our music video and print work.
Cons: Smartphone's quality depends on how much money you have so not everyone in our group had a high quality phone so it performed much slower than someone who had a high quality phone. Also you have to pay to go on the internet and depending on your contract, you may have a certain amount of data to browse the internet with. Also the phone has a limited battery life so we could only communicate for so long until we had to stop.
- Surveymonkey/Strawpoll
Pros: Surveymonkey and Strawpoll are websites that allows users to create surveys for other users to complete. It provides the results in the form of tables and bar charts so it was a quick and easy process to see the data recorded. Also it's very easy for the participants of the survey to use because all you had to do were to click a few buttons and it was done. It's also quite easy to create a survey. We used Surveymonkey and Strawpoll for audience feedback for our inital ideas of a music video and print work.
Cons: There was a limited amount of questions we could ask in one survey for Surveymonkey before we had to pay. This made it difficult to gather all the answers we needed and therefore our products may have suffered as a result. For Strawpoll, we could only ask one question at a time and the participants needed to perform an anti-bot check beforehand so it caused many complications and delayed progress.
Pros: onpostmordernism is a free website that allows users to research postmodernism and find out examples in the media world. It's fast, easy to use and user-friendly so a beginner could easily go on the website and learn about postmodernism. We used the website to also research postmodernism so that we had a clearer understanding of the topic. As a result, we could record the information we learnt into a PowerPoint.
Cons: There's alot of unnecessary information and suffered the same problems as Youtube and Google because there was no easy way to find the information we needed.
Construction
- Cameras
Pros: Cameras are devices that allow people to take pictures or record videos and upload it onto a computer to be edited or shared. We used DSLR cameras to record our music video and take pictures for our print work. We had two cameras in total, not counting the ones we had on our phones so it was relatively easy to film what we needed. The cameras were high quality so the video was nice and clear, similar to how it would be in a real music video. We could change the frame rate and exposure so the quality would be higher.
Cons: The quality of the camera depends on how much money you have. Whilst the quality was good, it was not the best so it wasn't music video standard. Not everyone knew how to use a camera so the cameramen were restricted to the ones who knew how to use it. Also, trying to do a camera movement such as an arc requires a very steady hand because the camera shaking is almost an inevitability without the equipment to help. The cameras also had a limited battery life so we had to rush some of our filming to get the most out of the day.
- Phone
Pros: Phones have cameras built into them so I used my phone to take pictures for our CD cover, magazine adverts and inserts. We also used our phones as a way to communicate each other to meet up at a certain location to start our filming.
Cons: Only my phone was good enough and high quality enough to take pictures for our print work. We couldn't use my phone for filming because it was too high quality so the difference would be very noticeable and jarring if we used my phone for filming. Also my phone was limited on battery so I needed to save some of the battery for the rest of the day.
- Premier Pro
Pros: Premier Pro is a service that allows uers to edit videos however they want. We already had prior experience to using Premier Pro so it wasn't as complicated as we expected it to be. We used Premier Pro to edit our music video together and add special effects such as the wipe transition. We could also insert pictures into the clips such as the YouTube overlay that we managed to do in our music video.
Cons: The only problem we had with Premier Pro was that it was not a free service therefore we could only work on the music video in school.
- Photoshop
Pros: Photoshop is an editing software for images. We used this software to edit our print work such as the CD covers, magazine adverts and inserts. It was very effective and there were a variety of tools to edit our images with such as a colour correction tool, cropping and adding specialized font.
Cons: Photoshop is not a free software so we ran into the same problem as Premier Pro in that we had to mainly work on our print work in school rather than at home.
- Blogger
Pros: We used Blogger to record our mid production audience feedback and filming days. There were the same advantages as in the research and planning stage.
Cons: The same problems as before and it was hard to record everything if you fall behind so you would have to rely on your group mates for information.
- Youtube + Google Drive
Pros: They were good services in enabling us to create and share content courtesy of Web 2.0. We used them to create and share our rough edits of our music video for audience feedback and we could share the results with Google Drive.
Cons: Whilst we can praise them for their good service, the files we created on YouTube took up alot of space on Google Drive so we were limited in storage space. They also take very long to upload so it was a very slow process that may have caused delays.
Evaluation
- Blogger
Pros: We used Blogger to answer our evaluation questions, analysis of our audience feedback and update our blogs in general. The same advantages as the research and planning.
Cons: The same problems as research and planning. Blogger is not very user-friendly. It is by far the least optimal blog website that should be used. Tumblr is a far better website that is much more modern. There were many formatting issues that were not resolved since the last time we used it.
- YouTube
Pros: We managed to create a YouTube channel to host our music video and audience feedback reaction videos. It is easily accessible for anyone and for viewing for our blogs. We could easily copy and paste the web address and upload it onto our blogs.
Cons: There were copyright infridgement claims on our music video therefore it made it more difficult for our video to be shared as a result.
Pros: Gif maker is a website allows anyone to upload a series of pictures or clips (part of Web 2.0) and merge it into a gif format. Gifs are simply the combination of video and pictures into one. It can play up to 10 seconds of videos or images. This also added some creativity and variety of content onto our blogs
Cons: Gifs are very limited to 10 seconds of video so we couldn't share everything we wanted. Also gif files are quite large and takes up alot of storage therefore it wasn't very efficient for our computers and caused lag. Also when they're uploaded onto our blogs, it takes a few minutes for it to fully load and viewed.
- Google Drive
Pros: As mentioned before, we could easily share audience feedback files such as results and reaction videos and music video files within our group for evaluation purposes.
Cons: As mentioned before, limited to 10GB of storage until you have to pay for more.