Rachel Cox A2 Media Studies
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research and Planning
Homepage​
Example page of Research
Example page of Planning
To create the portfolio of my music video and all of its research and planning processes, I made a website on Wix.com.
Wix was a great platform to display my work on, as it was easy to use and looked very professional. When comparing Wix to Weebly, I found Wix a lot more professional looking than Weebly. I found there to be a larger access to different website designs specific for the type of website you are making. As I was making a band-looking website this allowed me to create a website that achieved a clear brand-identity for my rock band 'The Rivals'. It also allowed my band's digipak and advert to flow with the overall band's identity created. From the homepage and throughout all the pages, the colour red is shown consistently. This allows my audience to identify that the band's colours are black and white with red too. The colour red also identifies them as a rock band as opposed to using pink and yellow colours, which may represent a pop artist or band. Showing consistency throughout my website ensured that my website was as professional looking as it could be.
I also had my target audience in mind when creating my website and decided that the colours I used linked well with them too. Due to my target audience being keen listeners of rock and majority male, I decided that darker colours allowed them to enjoy the website more than if I were to use bright colours, that identify with the pop industry. It would also make the website clear to those who may have never listened to rock before or seen any propaganda related to the rock industry. The colours and images used throughout the website link well with the industry and would clearly identify to new audiences that this is a rock band.​
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The only negative problem to Wix, in my opinion, is that at times it could be slow when processing what you have written. Due to this only being at times I think this is not a thing that would put you off of Wix as it is so simple to use.
Planning - Audience Feedback
I used Survey Monkey for producing a questionnaire for my target audience to provide feedback on. I sent this questionnaire via email and this allowed the process to be very quick and was suitable for my target audience to receive without any issues. I had no issues when creating this questionnaire, as Survey Monkey provides such an easy process when doing this and allows users like myself to easily email or send out a web link to their audience. The feedback layout was also very easy to read. This was due to the different colours within the colour scheme allowing me to notice the change in answers. The response time is shown in which each individual spent providing their audience feedback was 2 minutes and this was mainly due to how quickly it takes to use the website. I used Survey Monkey during my AS coursework when creating a horror film opening scene and I found my knowledge of using Survey Monkey had improved since. From using it last year, it allowed me to become familiar with all of the different types of questions and answer formats I could use.
Construction of music video
I-Movie (only on Apple products)
I used I-Movie as my editing platform when making my music video. I was familiar with using I-Movie as I had used it before when making my horror opening scene last year. This helped me to use I-Movie in a more creative and knowledgeable way, compared to using a new software and having little knowledge when using it. I knew a lot more about how to edit clips and the different features I could add to my overall music video to enable it to look professional. I-Movie is an uncomplicated platform to use in my opinion as everything is labelled easily and the layout works well when editing. It took me a little while to gather the footage needed for editing, but when I did the editing did not take very long to complete as I-Movie is an easy platform to work with.
I used a Canon 1000d to capture the footage needed for my music video. I think this camera worked perfectly for what I needed it to do. I also took a few still images with the camera and the quality for both them and the footage was extremely high. I attached this camera to a tripod, which allowed me to capture some great shots too.
I also captured a few clips with my iPhone which in my opinion may have let the quality down compared to the camera. Despite this, it could be the fact that the weather was so miserable and raining that the camera could not pick up the quality well enough. However, I do think the foggy quality links well with the song and its lyrics and I think that even though the different qualities are not the same, it does work well for the final product.
Evaluation
For one of my evaluation questions 'In what ways does your media product use. develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?'. I found emaze a great website to display my reasons as to how I used, developed or challenged forms and conventions of real media products. This is because it was a simple website to use when adding different screenshots and images, along with the explanation that linked back to the question. The only downside to using emaze was that when linking it to my Wix website I found it difficult.
Conclusion
To conclude, I believe that all of the media technologies I used within the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages in my coursework have been extremely useful and easy to use. I think that due to the majority of the media technologies being online, this made it a lot easier to promote my media products (music video, digipak and magazine advert) to a wider audience straight away. Having my music video on Youtube allowed my audience to watch the video straight away and provide their feedback via the comments option.