Question 3

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

RM During the early stages of this project we used Blogger.com to store all of our research and planning. Using Blogger gave us an easy and efficient way to store any of our important pieces of research or planning, as well as storing the drafts and the final designs for our digipak and any advertisements that we had created. We had used Blogger as a means of storing our work, as it is much easier than writing everything on paper and drawing all designs by hand.

JW It is also more effective then keeping everything on a single folder on the computer because it allows everybody in the group to gain access to the anything that we need provided that they have Internet access. Using Blogger also allowed us to embed videos from youtube to display publicly to anyone that came to the blog, these videos include actual music video that we had looked at for the purpose of research – studying the conventions used in the videos, the use of cinematography, mise en scene, etc – as well as our finished music video.

RM Photoshop was used during the construction of the ancillary tasks, such as the poster and digipak. They were made in Photoshop as it is an efficient and easy way to create images, and they can also be created in a format that can be uploaded to Blogger. Photoshop also allowed us to apply many different effects to any images that we had created, allowing us to make the digipak, poster, etc. more intricate and interesting to look at.

JW For the construction of the music video itself we used Final Cut Express. Using Final Cut was definitely an improvement over using iMovie. Final Cut was a little more complicate than iMovie to begin with but we quickly got used to how it worked and all of the features that it has over iMovie. Final cut provided us with an easy and simple way of syncing up the video to the audio effectively, if we were to do this in iMovie the process would have most likely been much longer and more frustrating to do.

RM In conclusion we that we have learned a lot from the new programs that we have used and it has broadened the range of programs that we can now use and has given us more experience overall in using new media technologies. We are also happy with how our final music video turned out but think that we could have made much improvement to it had we been given the time.