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

 Blogger:
I chose Blogger as a way to record my A2 advanced portfolio media project, because of the way media technologies can be incorporated with it easily. When using Blogger it is easy to embed videos from sites such as Youtube and Vimeo, you can also embed projects form other sites ie Poplet, Slideshare and Prezi. It is also easy to add pictures or links to other web pages to your posts. All of these features help to make the project more interesting and engaging for the user and means that they can interact with the page. This gives the audience a clearer idea of your thought process and enables them to view the thing that have inspired you first hand making it easier for them to understand the project. It is also possible to label the posts making the blog easy to navigate around.

Twitter:

Social media is a great way for producer of media to try and understand their target market. Twitter and other sites such as facebook give a invaluable insight into what is popular in today’s market, what sort of media the audience is use to and uses as well as their opinions and likes. Furthermore these sites can also help producers in the development stage of production. It is easy and requires no funds to post images or ideas on social media sites and ask for opinions, which is especially good for low budget productions where funding is minimal. Using these sites allows their designs to be viewed by vast amount of potential consumers who are usually happy to give unbiased opinions on the products.

Prezi:

Prezi was easy way to resent information in a fun and interactive way. The fact that photos and videos could be uploaded onto the ‘canvas’ meant that I could give visual aids to what I was saying as well as making it more interesting for the audience. The layout and ability to guide the viewer from one frame to the next as well as the user being able to explore if they wished to meant that the presentations were very interactive and engaging fore the viewer. Furthermore the design gave a clear and professional presentation that could be customised to suite your presentation I.e. my target audience Prezi uses image that relates to the topic and is eye-catching and fun. However the only downside to using Prezi is that I wished to provide links for the user to follow to give them additional information on bands or to take them directly to my sources of inspiration i.e. articles or blogs however Prezi doesn’t allow links so I was unable to include them in my presentations.

 

Photoshop:

Image: shows the different layers used to create the digipak many effects were applied and not all of them are going to be used. The only effects that are visible are shown by the eye in the left corner. 

Photoshop was extremely useful when I came to make my digipak and magazine advert as it enabled me to edit my products to a degree that wouldn’t have been possible in fireworks. I also used Photoshop to edit my drawings and create the style of illustration that now features on my products I wouldn’t have been able to create this style without the use of Photoshop’s layers and especially invert which made the outline of the image white and the background black. I used many effects including invert, which gave my image the white outline and black background to create the final image that is on the products.