The main hardware that I have used has been the Apple Mac; I occasionally used PCs to edit my blogs, but Macs were the tool I used to create my music video. The main software that was used was Final Cut Express as this has many advantages over iMovie that we have previously used; you can manipulate video clips in many different ways such as cutting, changing the speed, and adding effects. We could use multiple tracks within the programme so that you can have more than one clip playing at once; it also has the ability to layer clips making it easier to have one long clip playing and short clips on top to cut away easily. Similarly with Photoshop, I was not familiar with different effects that could be used, making the editing process very time-consuming for me. However, I found cutting and syncing the different clips fairly easy and didn’t have many problems, as long as I made sure the arrow pointed downwards to place the clip, and not sideways which causes everything after that to be out of sync.
When planning my ancillary task, I used media technologies to search for real media products that I can gather ideas from. I used the internet to search for other digipaks and concert posters that famous music artists have produced, or that other media students from previous years had made. This is important as you can see what elements work well, and which don’t and then add them to your work, or choose to leave them out - this way you give the audience what they want and they will be more likely to buy our product. We also took various location shots of what we could use in our video.
Throughout the construction stages of my ancillary task, I used various media technologies. The main hardware that I have used has been the Apple Mac; I occasionally used PCs to edit my blogs, but Macs were the tool I used to create my ancillary task. I used Photoshop to create my ancillary task because of its number of useful tools and ability to layer different images. With this program we can edit images in many different ways and add effects that will make your piece of work unique to the last detail. I used this throughout all my tasks.
If I redid this task, I feel that I would try to be more confident in trying different tools and seeing what I produce instead of using the few tools that I am comfortable with. I used a digital camera to take pictures of band members, which were then uploaded onto the Macs for me to crop and copy into my ancillary task.
A final way we used media technologies in our ancillary tasks is in our evaluation. In order to get some audience feedback we posted our work on the popular social networking site Facebook. We got multiple people giving us feedback on our work including what went well, and what we could do to improve it.
