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

I captured a few good shots on my iPhone and edited them with an app called Instagram, which allows you to alter tones, contrasts, with autofixed choices. I used the same effect, called X-Pro II, in order to maintain a similar style on each of the photos.

This app was very useful, as it was on my phone I could snap a shot whether i was on the bus, in the car, walking to school or when we were actually on location, and add the effect and save the photo there and then. I've taken many photos on this app and because of the effects we all agreed it suited the idea of having an idyllic setting as an album cover, so we went through them all and chose which ones we liked most. Out of them, a suprisingly plain photo ended up looking quite appealing. The colours were attractive, with a sillouette of a hill with a fence on the top, with the sun setting behind it. The picture gave us room to edit and also put in text and the two best ideas we had ended up like this:

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In order to create a professional looking graphic album cover, we had to find out how to work on illustrator or adobe photoshop CS5. Although photoshop was more easier to access through school, we decided to use 'illustrator' which specialises in graphic design. We travelled especially to an advertising agency who had the relevant equipment to produce a top-quality album cover. We used Adobe Illustrator on an Apple MAC.

During my research, I used various methods to present my findings in a simple, interesting yet clear way. I used a 'wordle' (http://www.wordle.net/) Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.I used wordle to show the initial thoughts of people when they were told the title of the song - "For The First Time".

'Prezi' was a useful tool to present my research of the song we decided to base our video around. Prezi lets you bring your ideas into one space and see how they relate, helping you and your audience connect. Zoom out to see the big picture and zoom in to see details — a bit like web-based maps that have changed how we navigate through map books. It cleverly showed a mordernised version of a slide-show that keeps the viewer focused and interested.  

A 'Scribd' allowed me to present an overall mind-map of all my ideas of my music video put together.

To edit themusic video, we used the programme 'adobe premier elements' which, although it took a lot of getting used to, proved to be very helpful in ensuring the quality of our video. The many effects and transitions were placed on our footage to give it a professional element to it. The endless hours using this programme proved worth it!

In conclusion, it can be said that I have used all different types of media technoligies to research and construst my main product and ancillary texts. Furthermore, these technologies have appeared in my planning and evaluation stages to modernise yetclearly present work.