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

Research

While researching for my music video production and ancillary tasks I used many different search engines.
Google or Safari was used mainly to search for conventions of types of genres of songs and for useful Digi-pack and magazine information.

Last year my research was very vague and needed to be more in-depth, this year i used many sources i hadn't previously used a lot, like; Wikipedia, Prezi and Slideshare. More in-depth research, in my opinion; has resulted in the final outcome (final products) being a lot better than AS.

I also used Survey Monkey to acquire personal preferences and general information to learn more about my target audience and their preferences.

Planning 

Using my blog (Blogger) has been very effective at helping me plan the filming of my music video, the structure (labels) allowed me to know where all my posts where located and helped me when i needed to go back and address a certain research post i had done, e.g. conventions of Rock. 

Filming 

Apart from AS i had no experience filming, so at A2 i made great effort learning how to use new equipment, e.g. green screen, cameras, dolly, tripod etc. 

Editing

I didn't edit the music video but i was present when it was being completed and aware of how it was being done, when editing we used Final Cut Pro, many additional effects like sound were also added.

This year (A2) i feel like the development in editing is obvious as there is such an improvement in editing quality from AS to A2.  I'm going to show some examples of how thorough the editing was completed.

The Victorian colour scheme was changed before the song begins to add to the mood and also looped 'industrial sound effects' to make the atmosphere more 'realistic'. 

When filming the green screen section we imported it into Final Cut Pro and removed all the on screen objects and replaced it with the colour white to make it look like only Ryan and a white background were present.

Here's a YouTube video breaking down the editing process of my final production:

Ancillary Tasks

I used Microsoft word, Paint and Photoshop to construct my final digipak design and magazine. Photoshop helped me delete any borders around pictures and logos that didn't look correct; for example an Instagram logo had white borders around it and since the background of my magazine is black, it looked amateur;

Evaluation

During the evaluation stage i created a YouTube video to explain how effective the contribution is to my main production (music video) and the ancillary tasks, digi-pack and a magazine cover. I used Google Images to extract certain images that helps me evaluate my productions, e.g. like the Jay Z magazine cover that helped me established certain conventions of music artist's magazine covers, like lighter colours are associated with 'Pop' music magazines. I decided to react against this convention by using primarily darker colours in my final magazine design.