In the research stage we only used a PC, this was because it was what we were used to working with, we found it easy to use and it had all the programs we needed at that point. Mainly, at this stage, we were just using websites online for research for our own products. We set up a blog on Blogger to show the work we had done chronologically. Blogger is good for simple text posts and its easy to understand. You can change the way it looks to fit with the digipak, advert and video meaning everything ties in together. A bad point about Blogger is that it can be difficult to add pictures in text posts even though it is an option. It can be difficult to resize and order the pictures and usually it ends up looking messy.
On Mr Ford's blog he had posted a Scribd document of the schedule and deadlines, I then copied the embed code and pasted it to my blog so that I could have it there for reference. On my personal blog I pasted two other Scribd documents originally posted by Mrs Hammond with the mark schemes for the music video and the digipak and advert. This meant that I could refer to it at any point.
I used Google a lot, it made the research stage a lot easier because it is simple to use. I used for the audience profile, when researching bands that the consumer may listen to and places that she may shop. I also used it to find pictures that would influence the look of my video, digipak and advert.
Part of the research stage was to find other influential texts and analyse them; for this I used Youtube. Youtube is simple and quick to use, I found all the videos I was looking for in good quality and I could easily analyse sections of the video.
Towards the end of the research stage, when we putting our ideas together we were asked to create a pitch that we would then present to the rest of the class. For this pitch Mae and I used animoto, a slideshow type technology. I find that this can make any presentation look interesting because of the effects it uses. It doesn't take a lot of work to make it look good, so you can focus more on what information you are going to put into it. On this program you can add text, pictures and music.
In the planning stage we also created a Twitter for our band. This helped to develop the personalities of the band members as well as making the band more believable. I mainly used Twitter from home on my laptop and even though I don't use it a lot personally I found that it was easy to use. Even though there is a word limit on the text posts it worked well for the kind of messages I wanted to write.
After creating the storyboard of our video we made an animatic. In order to do this I used Windows Live Movie Maker on my laptop. The process of importing the music and the pictures was simple enough but I did have a few problems when putting the animatic together. It took a few tries to get the timings of the clips right and sometimes it went out of sync.
We also took location shots for the blog using a Canon camera. We uploaded the photos from the memory card on to the PC and then uploaded them to Blogger. These pictures were used to show different parts of the location and as I hadn't seen the location first hand it gave me an idea of how it looked. This meant we could discuss which parts looked best before we actually started filming. The location shots also showed teachers and the class initial location ideas if they wanted to know.
For the draft digipak and advert I used Word. I wasn't originally planning to do this, I was planning to do the rough drafts to get placements of images and text and then quickly move on to Photoshop. In the end, though, I decided that for the drafts Word worked quite well. I used Google to get some images that I wanted and used the text and picture formatting tools on Word to create my drafts. Because Word is mainly a writing program sometimes it was difficult to get the images in the right places but I managed to fix this.
When I did start my final pieces I used Photoshop. Obviously this was a much better quaility program for what I wanted to do but it was quite complicated to use. There were a lot of options, tools and effects,which to someone who had never really got to grips with Photoshop was a bit daunting. Eventually, after using it for a while I became quicker at using the program and it became easier to understand. I uploaded both the drafts and the final digipak and advert to Blogger.
For the music video we used Final Cut pro on the Macs. I had never used a Mac before and though they were quite different to the PCs I found that I adapted quickly and one I had got used to the differences it was simple to use. Final Cut Pro took a while to get the hang of but once I'd used it a few times and got used to the tools and the options it was enjoyable to work with and I was able to use it productively.
When writing the evaluation questions I only used Blogger. I used it to write up the answers to the questions, to check previous students work for reference and to check Mr Ford's blog for advice and links.
A good response. Have you considered how you will present all your answers for your final version?
ReplyDelete