Evaluation Question Four

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

This is my second year using blogger, I think its a vital in taking A2 media, although I don't feel my skills have developed in this area. Since the standards are so high and and my world as a teenagers revolves around technologies such as the Internet and social networking sites, it is more effective and theres no limit.

Our two media teachers introduced us to Adobe Premiere, which was installed for our purpose to edit and create our video. Rebecca and I, used our Preliminary task to familiarise ourselves with the tools on the programme. I had been warned Premiere can be temperamental and has difficulty rendering, so we were anxious to use it. Although when you play around with different shots, I found I was impressed and shocked that I could do such things on school computers. It enabled us to overlay footage, slow down and speed up shots, change the hue and saturation to improve the quality and add text at the ending of the video to make it seem even more professional. I was overwhelmed that I was using a programme which renowned in the industry, it motivated me further to attempt to make something dead professional.
Fortunately we installed it into the schools system although if we hadn't had this software our trailer wouldn't be half as realistic. The cross dissolves, fades and saturation's all are major aspects of our trailer which we needed to make our trailer adequate.

We used Photoshop CS4 to create our two ancillary tasks, its not available on the schools computers, but i have it installed on my home computer form last year. It was great fun and an ease to create, as the layers just simply were created individually over lapping the different bases we compiled. Again with Photoshop I was wary, as i thought of its reputation being to extinguish blemishes from models and remove unwanted skin etc. My opinion soon changed and i enjoyed using the programme.

In terms of recording our research, evaluation, construction and planning stages we were told in the brief that we had to use a blogger.com. I immediatly sign in to my existing account and proceeded to create a new Blog, 6 month later and it almost done. I was familiar with blogger already & in my AS blog i mentioned that this year i would continue, loyal to blogger. Over all it is an easier solution to recording our work being faster, a lot safer than a folder that can get lost or damaged.
Photoshop CS4 was used to create both of our ancillary tasks. We worked with Photoshop as we could edit photos with ease on Photoshop. This is the second year i have used photoshop for my media, and not once had a problem or malfunction with the programme.

> An example being our Magazine poster.
Firstly we added layers which replaced the photo on the base. Through transparency levels I got carried away and introduced an actual eye to the background of the logo, Photoshop helped us in creating and manipulating the images added a unique selling point to our magazine.

Media technologies in the A2 course are essential, creating our products would not of been possible without them.
From watching all the previous adverts on YouTube, Googling the history of Soap and using Facebook to gain inspiration from my friends it has aided us to an amazing extent.

Taking into account the main negative about the technology used was the video cameras that we recorded our advert with. During the feedback stages a lot of people commented on the sometimes grainy quality of the film.
Below shows a clip I found on YouTube at the start of this process, not being conformable with my skills in premiere. This advice, educate me out of school hours.