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

We used the internet as our main tool with in our main and ancillary tasks as it has many different properties for watching videos and researching information:
• Google – We used this as our main search engine through this we found other artists websites found out about digipaks and discovered links to videos. We used googles image site to give us ideas for our photo shoot through paparazzi shots and professional photo shoots.
• You Tube – this is where we watched music videos for our research and we could also watch home made music videos to show us what could be achieved with little equipment and basic knoledge of film making.
• MySpace Music – This is where we researched unsigned artists as they post videos and music in hope of promoting themselves. We were able to notice trends that people in our chosen genre were following. This ensured that our products were current and up to date with the standards held within the industry.
• Blogger – this is where we kept a diary of our production prosseses.
We used the Macs in our school which had software such as:
• I Movie HD – We ued this software least year in our foundation task. However this year we had to not only remember our skills from last year but had to also learn new methods of using the editing and FX as a music video has a different feel to a film opening. We were able to experiment with FX and Transitions along with precise editing
• Photoshop Elements – None of us had use this programme before so to get a feel for the programme we just dove straight in and just through trial and error discovered different FX and editing tools we also had help from teachers so we could learn quicker.
• Preview – Through this we were able to view all of our images.
• Safari – This web browser enabled us to access the Internet and view high quality web streams of videos and audio files.
• I Web – This is a programme that allows you to create a webpage. This is also a programme none of us has used before but we easily figured out how to input pictures and text with music and videos. One thing we struggled with was resizing the page to fit in everything we wanted to include but through testing different methods and thinking logically we managed to figure out how the measurements of the page were altered.
These were all the main things that were involved in our production tasks. iMovie was used to import and edit all our footage. With out this software we would not have created a film which we were happy with as this is the main software we used. Photoshop was a new programme we used to edit our photographs, this was a development of skill from our As course as none of us had used this software before. It helped us create professional standard photographs and add effects that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to achieve. I Web was another programme that we had never used before and so we had to experience with this as well. Through all our research into websites we knew the layout we wanted and so found it really easy to translate this into the programme and make the product we desired.
If we were to do these tasks again we feel that we would like to use the newer version of iMovie as we feel this would give us more scope to be creative and use more effective FX and transitions, other than this I feel that we have used the software that we had at had to the best of our abilities and have created products that replicate our skills well.