Evaluation, question four: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

 Q4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technology has made a phenomenal contribution to the construction of the Year 13 Media Studies coursework. The work itself is presented on a blog, hosted by blogger.com, owned by Google. Using a blog provides a clear and accessible space online for displaying work in an organised fashion. The comments system of the site allows for immediate feedback from teachers to revise posts and a chance for other students to give feedback on your work. Storing the work online eliminates any risks of permanently losing an important post, and the option to edit work allows for quick revisions, as opposed to re-writing the entire post. Sites including Blogger/BlogSpot give both amateur and professional writers and journalists the opportunity to showcase their work on a regular basis to a growing audience on the Internet. Without the Internet, the immediacy and convenience of marking, writing and publishing the blog would not be possible, as well as the ability to access enormous amounts of resources to research and plan the production, with hyperlinks to sites for further information. Search engines, particularly Google Images, were useful in finding a handful of images for specific objects, such as the cameras.

YouTube Suggestions

When researching possible bands to promote in my video and print productions, I used a variety of websites. YouTube, an extremely popular video hosting site launched in 2005, provided me with instant access to bands’ songs and music videos to refer to and choose from. Searching for ‘unsigned British bands’ via the provided search engine, I was able to find several possible bands (which I later discarded) which appealed to me. After searching for and watching a selection of videos, the site provides a list of recommended videos based upon what you have been watching, which in the case of The Jubilees included Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys, Oasis and various other similar bands. If a video was unavailable or cannot be embedded onto the blogs, often due to copyright and regional restrictions, I opted to use Vimeo, an alternative video hosting website on which I found an instance of the Gorillaz video ‘Stylo’ that could be embedded for planning. The Jubilees themselves were found, along with an HTML embedding code for ‘Insomniac,’ on Unsigned Band Web, a site that provides free music performed by and information on unsigned bands. The site was useful for its sub-sections of genres, which include Rock, in which The Jubilees are classified. The social networking site MySpace provided further information on The Jubilees, particularly their perceived subgenres and fans. A variety of signed and unsigned bands have MySpace pages on which their content can be played or ‘liked’ by fellow users, who can show their support and positive criticism for the band by subscribing to their page. By viewing those who comment on and ‘follow’ the band, I was able to identify the audience clearly.

MySpace page of The Jubilees

Unsigned Band Web

Vimeo

When researching similar texts, I used YouTube to easily access artists’ content on demand. I used the site to research specifically into the conventions of popular Indie Rock bands and videos, as detailed in this planning post on audience. YouTube was also useful in researching intertextual references for the video, as The Third Man was available to watch in full at the time of the course’s beginning. The official websites of similar bands, including Kasabian, Klaxons and Arctic Monkeys were also utilised for inspiration on the print productions, as the designs incorporate aspects of the bands’ latest cover art. Wikipedia was used to begin to look into Dadaism as an art form after being suggested by a teacher. Much of the inspiration for the print productions stemmed from Dada and its contemporaries. The work of Olly Moss also served as inspiration, and was accessed directly through his website/online portfolio. The Internet Movie Database was also helpful in sourcing information on similar films and aspects of planning, such as detailed information on ‘Carnival of Souls.’

Researching the audience was partly contributed to by MySpace, which clearly identified which users associated themselves with a certain band or genre. Choosing, identifying and researching my target audience was mostly aided by Channel 4’s ‘Find Your Tribe’ online survey and corresponding site on which the findings were displayed, ‘UK Tribes,’ which contained fairly detailed classifications of the supposed tribes that British youths associate themselves with (my target audience came to be classified within the ‘Young Alternatives’ section). Analysing the layout of the websites for the Reading and Leeds festivals contributed toward the design of the print productions, and helped to further identify the audience, who are likely to attend festivals such as Reading and Leeds.

Canon camcorder (above) & stills camera (below)

During the planning phase, shots of locations, props and actor(s) were taken using a Canon Digital IXUS 960 stills camera already owned by my household. The camera allowed for the viewing of shots as they were taken and afterwards in a gallery, allowing me to assess the quality and viability of shots before transferring them to the computer. Digital cameras are extremely useful for the quick development of images, as they can be directly transferred to a folder on a computer through a USB connector. The various photo options of the camera also allowed for a variety of different shots, especially influenced by the feature of toggling the flash, ruling out any chances of shots being negatively affected by lighting problems. The print screen option on computer keyboards was helpful for creating images for use on the blog of websites and productions during the creation process. The images were cropped and had their colours corrected in Microsoft Office Picture Manager to remove unimportant information, allowing for precise screen captures from sites and videos. Further references were made during planning to sources of inspiration through YouTube and IMDb.

The presentation hosting and creation site Prezi allowed me to publish engaging presentations which were easily embedded into the blog posts, whilst Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 was efficient in creating pre-formatted graphs to fill in with information from the written questionnaires, to be imported into Prezi. A HP PhotoSmart Premium all-in-one printer was used to scan in documents such as the questionnaires. Microsoft Word was used to write the initial plans and drafts for blog posts. Home entertainment was a valuable section of the market to utilise in terms of technology; digital channels such as MTV Rocks were used to watch certain music videos, as well as the ‘Music on Demand’ feature of Virgin’s cable television service, complimenting the already convenient service of YouTube and Vimeo. ITunes was useful in seeking album artwork for similar artists, as well as customer reviews to judge the credibility of chosen bands. When planning the intertextual references and mood of the video, DVDs also proved useful, such as a copy of Carnival of Souls purchased at a mere pound during a shopping trip.

Screen capture of the creation of a graph presentation at Prezi.com

During the construction of the music video, a Canon md205 DV camcorder was rented from the school for periods of forty-eight hours to film the raw footage. Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 was used on my home computer as the primary editing software to create the print productions, using Powerpoint once as the only other program to create a single star design. An older version of Adobe Premiere Elements designed for use with Windows XP was used in the school’s media editing suite to edit the music video. The Canon DV camcorder featured an adjustable screen on which the footage could be viewed during filming and played back afterwards. Being able to review raw footage allowed me to identify viable shots for the final edit during the shoot, thus making progress in the selection of shots.

Final shot of Insomniac

Editing on the computer allowed me to easily alter the speed of shots, increasing the percentage in the editing software and making the movement faster. It also allowed me to make precise and neat cuts between shots and remove undesired sound effects such as echoing footsteps in an outdoor setting. The final shot was reversed to appear as if a peculiar light engulfs the scene, as the original image began dark before having a light shone onto the prop of the gun. The cross-fades and partially transparent images were far easier to create on a computer, as the settings allowed for a precise measurement of opacity. The filter system in Photoshop Elements 10 was helpful in applying professional effects to the print images, such as the cut-out option which was heavily used. The colour selection and fill functions allowed a desired colour to be sampled from elsewhere in the image to fill in a specific section of varying colour. The fonts were chosen from the provided selection and made to appear curved to the shapes of the image by using a custom path. The collage effect was created by using the selection tool to delete spaces around the raw images, which were then moved and layered. The EMI logo, compact disc logo and bar code were sourced from a search engine, edited to be of higher colour quality (through filling the colours) and inserted into the images. The size of the document was alterable to the accuracy of a single millimetre or pixel, enabling me to match the size of the designs with the official measurements of DVD cases, referenced from this site. The quality of the designs was maintained by saving the files in a ‘portable network graphics’ format, which provides 'lossless' data compression for images, as opposed to the ‘JPEG’ format, which can drop in quality as the image size is altered.

Photo editing in Adobe Photoshop Elements 10

Process of cropping an image in Picture Manager

In the evaluation stage, several technologies already utilised elsewhere in the process have been used to improve the presentation of the questions, inserting media for comparative purposes. Questionnaires, magazine covers and exemplary digipak designs have been scanned in via the HP printer. Videos have been embedded from YouTube, a version of the Insomniac single is embedded via Unsigned Band Web and presentations are included from my Prezi account. Images from videos and print screened websites have been cropped in Picture Manager and added, with captions to explain their significance, and works such as paintings have been sourced from search engines. The Portable Document Format (file format .pdf) host ‘Scribd’ was used in a post to embed a document of the Reading Festival line-up. All images have been added to blog posts through an option to upload files from my documents. The wide variety of formats from different sites, especially sized to fit within the boundaries of the blog column, present the songs, videos and written content between paragraphs of work in a flowing presentation of work and research.

HMTL display of a blog post, in which videos and other media can be embedded