Question 4: How Did You Use New Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages

All stages of the creation of my final media products in both AS and A2 media have been published online on blogger.com, which is a part of the Google enterprise. The advantage of using an online blog to publish all my work including research, planning, development of the construction process and evaluation is that my work is part of the web 2.0 community meaning that I have the possibility for the online community to access my work and I can achieve instant feedback and have a closer producer/audience relationship. This way I am constantly learning how my target audience perceive my work and constructive feedback/comments gives me the chance to take on their criticisms in order to go back and edit/update my blog posts. This is another advantage as by having all my work documented online I can access it from any computer anywhere in the world and be able to work on my posts without limitation; also the quality of the work doesn’t get damaged or lost as easily as it would if documented all on paper for example.

Other online sites I have used in publishing my work are YouTube and SlideShare. Through YouTube once again I am able to publish my finished product online for the YouTube community to be able to view from anywhere in the world with the chance to comment on my video, again giving me instant feedback and insight into my target audience. I can also embed my YouTube videos onto my blog making all my work centred in one place creating one whole package for the online community to view without having to travel around the internet through different links to find different parts of my work. With SlideShare I am able to upload Powerpoint presentations onto the internet and once again embed the presentation on to my blog; this gives variance to the way I am presenting my information, instead of always being simply typed essays on to my blog. It also makes the blog a more interactive experience for the users.

In the construction of my ancillary texts I used Dafont.com and Sxc.hu which are websites that contain unrestricted un-copyrighted high quality fonts, images and flourishes for me and anybody with access to the internet to download for our own personal use. Once downloaded I am free to edit the fonts, images however I like as the fact that they are unrestricted gives me the freedom to do whatever I wish with them. This is a fantastic way of creating a high quality amateur production that rivals the quality of expensive professional productions, although this does bring up the problem of no cost, no profit free content. Through the use of new media technologies and the accessibility of amateur productions, the future of professional productions could be threatened. If people can get similar products to what the professionals are making for free they aren’t going to be as willing to pay for the professional products that aren’t.

Whilst on the subject of high quality amateur productions there were a range of other new technologies that helped me to create my high quality main product and ancillary texts. For my ancillary texts the use of a 10mp digital SLR camera (Canon EOS 500D) gave me very high quality images that I could then go on to edit in Adobe Photoshop, an editing programme with an infinite amount of tools that can be used to create any image desired. I used tools such as layering, the magic brush tool, opacity alteration, the free transform tool, the eyedropper and paint bucket tool, the brightness/contrast tool, different filter tools and many more. The opacity tool helped me to create the sandy texture that every panel on my digipak has. Through the use of the eyedropper and paint bucket tools I have managed to keep the quality of my digipak to a high standard as they helped me keep the colour scheme constant throughout making sure the exact same shade of blue/yellow/brown was used on each panel. The free transform tool helped me to alter my flourishes so that they all looked unique and I avoided using the same ones over and over, this once again adds to the quality of the overall package and prevents the flourishes looking boring and over used.

Through the constant proliferation of digital software and hardware such as Photoshop and digital SLR cameras new products are coming out all the time making older yet perfectly proficient models very cheap and easily accessible once again adding to the idea that unprofessional productions can be of such a high quality. It also means anybody that wants to make an amateur video or image with access to the technology can easily come to grips with the software/hardware and grow in creativity and skill once again threatening the need for professional productions and people who work within this sector. To further back up this statement I can prove this through the technologies I used to create my thriller product and music video. For these I used a digital video camera (Canon MiniDv) that captures high quality moving images. It is lightweight with a relatively long battery life and is easy to carry around from location to location. Also I used the non-linear editing software Adobe Premier Elements, which much like Adobe Photoshop has a fantastic range of editing tools that with sufficient knowledge and practice can be used to make almost any effect desired. I used a wide range tools in the editing stage of my music video and although it took a long time and a lot of trial and error I managed to learn new skills and more about the software throughout the process. Tools I used included: the time stretch tool, resizing, the brightness/saturation tool, cross fades, advanced effects, the crop tool, titles and a lot more. Desired effects that I managed to create through these tools were the idea of panelling. With the use of the resizing tool and layering I could show three different sets of moving image in one frame which created this panelling effect. Another example is that through the use of time stretch I could make one clip fit into a desired time slot for instance the clip of the hand travelling down the banister would have been far too short to suffice on its own alongside a lyric unless I used the time stretch tool to slow it down to half speed. It also helped with speeding up the packing scene as without the time stretch tool this clip would have been far too long to use in the video and would have had to have been scrapped.

Finally, linking back to web 2.0 and the online community, through the fantastic reputation MySpace has built up for it’s unsigned band community I knew exactly where to go when I was told I needed to find an unsigned band to use for my music video. It’s not hard to know where to start when looking for unsigned bands on MySpace, on a famous bands page such as Jason Mraz there are plenty of similar unsigned bands in the comment section of the page often saying take a listen to our new track etc. And once again with the constant proliferation of new technologies these bands, even though being unsigned and unfunded, have access to the technologies that let them create high quality music tracks meaning it wasn’t hard at all for me to find an artist with music of a professional quality. Through the use of online network site MySpace I have managed to keep in touch with my artist giving her constant feedback on the work I am doing with her music, this once again shows how the online community brings together and personalises the producer/audience relationship and how much more personal online communities have made artist/audience relationships.
Although on the surface having access to these sites like Myspace and YouTube to create, produce and publish content seems like a great way to create cheap high quality products, we as a producer are not gaining the financial rewards that we could had we made the product from scratch. Effectively, Myspace is part of a conglomorate owned by Rupert Murdoch alongside media products: Fox TV, Sky TV, The Times and many others. (Equally, YouTube and blogger are the same, they are part of a conglomorate run by the owners of Google). Myspace is a new technology that creates a framework for the online public to take and build their content on, as we publish our new product onto the website it becomes a 'money maker' for them, the more popular the product gets the more 'hits' the site gets and the more hits the site gets the more money goes into the conglomorate's pocket. Originally in order for amateur filmmakers/musicians/etc to create the content they had to create the online vehicle but with Myspace and Youtube creating the vehicle for us they have made the process more accessible for amateurs making us feel more empowered as a producer to create high quality, high standard products that reach a large audience, this is clever as although it makes us feel more empowered in financial terms we are not. As Myspace and YouTube are simply websites that hold a framework and the users are making the content, the websites are very low maintanence therefore low cost to run as unlike 'The Times' they don't constantly have to update the website with new content, in a way we are the equivalent of the reporters and columnists of a newspaper, we are doing the graft and coming up with the stories but at the end of the month we aint getting no pay check!!
Why did Murdoch risk billions on buying these innovative new style sites when they didn't know whether the product would succeed or not?
Myspace was originally marketed as the main place for new unsigned bands, this attracted a young, creative and technologically savvy middle class demographic, and with the web 2.0 technology users could comment on each others products saying what they do and don't like about them, this gave a strong basis for the makers to learn who their target audience are and they immediately know where to market to and they can maintain the assurance that they are always targeting the right audience as trends change as they are constantly monitoring media consumption habits. The up to date interactive technology makes this an easy problem to tackle. Myspace's success and popularity has come from it's successful marketing to the right people which has led to them essentially monopolising the unsigned new music market, so although initially Myspace was a huge risk the pinpoint market focus has paid off and the popularity has led to them raking in the profits. Myspace was one of the first of these style websites to take the risk and in showing how successful it has been with the online community there has been a boom in online interactive networking sites and frameworks such as Bebo, Facebook, Twitter etc.