We had to start somewhere, so before familiarizing ourselves with more advanced media technologies we made sure we were familiar with the basics. These include;
Microsoft Office - We used the programs within Microsoft Office as 'default' ways of presenting our work. PowerPoint and Word allowed us to present our work simply and easily before we attempted to use more intricate presentation programs such as Prezi and Glogster.
Google Chrome - Searching the Internet was a must for our research. Our chosen browser was Google Chrome, as it is fast reliable and easy to use.
Blogger - The backbone of our technological entourage, we used this website to make an accessible collective of all of our work. The program allowed us to create a blog, edit it's look and create subtitles in order to better arrange our work.
Apple Macintosh - We needed a piece of hardware on which we could use our software and the Apple Macintosh machines were available in our college. We chose to use this over a PC due to it being crafted for educational and creative purposes.
The track we decided to use 'Little Black Submarines' was available in the iTunes store, which we purchased for 99p. We then added it to the iTunes app on our computer at college, which allowed us to store the file and use it in other applications, such as Final Cut Express HD in which we needed the track to create our music video.
We have used Twitter to ask for permission from The Black Keys and their record label to use their track "Little Black Submarines." We also uploaded our video to this site to gain some audience feedback for another evaluation question.
Prezi and Glogster were useful throughout the project. These two formats of presentation are both web based and very useful due to their ease of accessibility and the boost of presentation when coming to make the evaluations and even if we just want to spruce up a blog post.
Both have many useful features, such as allowing users to add videos, photos and sound, as well as having many animations and images that make the presentations more eye catching. This fixes the audience's attention to the presentation, as many audience members may be very intrigued by how the Prezi or Glogster looks.We have chosen to use these alternative forms of presenting our work in order to diversify the way our blog looks.
We used google docs when obtaining information on our primary audience research so we could create a questionnaire to send to our target audience. Another feature of Google docs is that it creates graphs from the feedback when have received in which we can then clearly present on our blog in a way that is clearly understandable.
The construction element of our project was controlled by final cut and Photoshop. The final digipak and advert were created in Photoshop and the final music video was created on final cut express.
In our research, we often used Microsoft office to present our work. This is because we were most comfortable using this type of software for resenting our work in the earlier stages of the project. We occasionally used Prezi for our work and to upload it to Blogger we used Google Chrome. We usually stuck with the basics during research.
While planning our music video we used an array of technologies. We used Twitter to get permission from the band to use their song for our music video. Again we used Microsoft Office (Word and PowerPoint) to present a lot of our work rather than just writing it on our blogs as a post. We planned the structure of our music video by making storyboards then taking pictures of them using a camera to then add to our blog. to then add motion to our storyboards, we used final cut to turn them into an animatic and added music over the top, final cut allowed us to do this, then it was a case of uploading that to youtube then to our blogs. When creating our advert and digipak, we used photoshop to mess around with the layout to find its final form.
From looking at the combination of technologies we used, we can com to the conclusion that each of these technologies have helped us specifically in each of the stages; research, planning, construction and evaluation.
