How did you use media technologies in the construction and

research, planning and evaluation stages?

Technologies within

my research

Survey Monkey: This is a website that I used to create and share questionnaires with people through my blog and social networking sites. Doing this made it simple for me to gather results and find out what I needed to know about my target audience.

Microsoft Excel: I used Microsoft excel to display the results that I found from my surveys through graphs. I did this so that myself and others, could easily see the results that I had gathered. Having them in a graph format made the construction of my focus group a lot easier, as I was able to take a quick look at the graphs and see the results.

Magazine and DVD Covers: I used the search engines on internet browsers to research and analyse similar magazine and DVD covers to help me. Doing this helped me to understand what conventions were used within this genre of product and what I had to do when it came to creating my own covers. I embedded the images onto my blog and made detailed analysis on each that I found.

Here is an example of one of the analysis’ that

Using the internet within my research

I used various websites to enable the best possible research. I used sites such as facebook.com, youtube.com and twitter.com, also I used the blogging site, blogger.com, to upload and share all of my research. I used YouTube to collect research on opening sequences to similar products, such as “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”. I watched the videos, embedded them onto my blog and then analysed the videos based on the conventions used, settings, sound etc. This gave me a very strong knowledge of what I would need to use within my own opening sequence. I used Facebook and twitter to get feedback for my questionnaires that I created. This was a simple and effective way of collecting results as millions of people log onto both sites each and every day. I posted a link to my questionnaire on my facebook wall and asked people to do it for me. I used blogger throughout my research to post all of my analysis’ and the results of my research. The blog was extremely good to use. It worked really well and was good for my specific needs. It embeds videos and uploads photos simply and effectively. It’s easy to navigate around and to collect response's on my work. Without the internet I believe I would have found it a lot harder to collect the information that I did, as I would have had to found oldDVD’s and magazines from various places, and I would have found it difficult to keep all of my work in a good order.

Technologies used within my planning

In my planning I created a story board via Microsoft Word. I created a table that gave me enough space to hand draw the pictures in and gave me room to describe the shot types I will be using. I used Word because it is very simple to create a graph on this programme. I also used Microsoft Word to create draft fonts for my ancillary tasks. I used these are there are a wide range of fonts on the programme and I also used this to make the draft work for my magazine in my ancillary task work.

I used Paint within my planning in many different ways. I used it to help create my draft colour schemes for the DVD covers and my magazine covers. I used paint to help to crop some of the pictures that I used within my planning to make them fit into the areas I wanted them. By using Paint I was able to save the file as a jpeg. file

Technologies used within my construction

Throughout the construction of my filming I used a tripod for the camera . Doing so made sure that all of the filming looked more professional as they camera wasn’t shacking, and all the shots were to a high standard. The group I worked within and myself found that this piece of technology really helped with the overall outcome of our final audio-visual piece.

For the filming of our piece, we used Sony video recorders. These camera’s were very small and easy to use, with high quality pictures. They also had the ability to take still photos, which my group needed to complete our task, therefore it saved us some time when it came to constructing our piece. The camera was easy to use when it came to uploading to a computer and it did

everything that we needed it to do.

I uploaded my audio-visual piece to Apple MacBook's. Before this course, I had never used one and found them very difficult at first, but after a short while I found them just as easy to use as any other laptop. The MacBook had all the programmes I needed to complete my coursework to the standard I wanted and was very useful when it came to editing our piece.

Technologies used within my constructionFor the fonts of my ancillary tasks, I used a website called

Dafont. This website had many different variations of school/child like fonts, which made my work more relatable to the audience. Without this site I would have had to use one of the default fonts from Word or Word Art, which would have meant that my fonts would not have been such a high standard. The site was easy to use and copying and pasting the fonts into my own work was simple too.The final piece of technology used was iMovie. This is an editing

programme that was already on the MacBook’s. It was very simple to open our piece of audio-visual work and to start editing on straight away. Using this we were able to make a good final product thanks to our editing we did on this programme.

Technologies used within my evaluation

Microsoft PowerPointI chose this for my evaluation as it was a simple, yet fun way for me to present it. Having all the animations and being able to include images makes PowerPoint presentations more than just a long read.

Prezi I had never used Prezi before but I found that using this site for my evaluation has made it less dull and less text based. The site allows you to create text and images and lets you put the focus on different pieces of information at a time. I found it fun to use and very worthwhile towards my work. Survey Monkey

Using survey monkey, I was able to find out what people thought of my final product with one simple and easy questionnaire. I found this site was very good at getting feedback on my work and that it gives you to opportunity to ask any questions you wish, therefore it was very relevant.