Evaluation Question 3

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

First and foremost excluding the hardware, the level of research and planning would not have been as significant if it wasn't for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. I used Wikipedia when we as a group came to a conclusion with what song we was going to be doing. If we went with a rap/hip hop genre research I would not have to be as heavy on the research but as I knew little to nothing on our chosen genre. I felt it was relevant to do thorough research on it to get a good sense of what the characteristics are or were and who were the most popular. The research concluded with bright colours, sunglasses, suits and parties being characteristics of the genre. I also learnt that Electropop is or was only a sub name for the genre synthpop where the instrument synthesizer was dominant. Time moving on, conventions changed but I still got a lot of inspiration from the pioneers of the genre for a solid electropop feel.

Like last year, the macs were equally as vital and important this year. The process of getting screen grabs on a mac is far quicker and easier in comparison to a normal windows computer. By pressing ctrl shift 4, it allows to take a perfect screen grab of what is on screen. Regardless of the software, this little feature in my opinion is the most important feature to creating a blog because of the time being saved compared to a normal windows computer (taking a screen  shot and then putting it in MS paint and cropping). With the screen shots, our college installed a new software called Voila. I am not 100% sure as to everything you can do on it, as I only used it in my earlier stages but I was using it to highlight certain aspects of the screen shots that I was talking about this includes drawing shapes around them. When at home I was using MS paint to do so, equally the same process only when you screen shot it includes the html bar and start options etc. This just tampers with the resolution of the final image even after cropping as it is so big compared to the macs small precise screen shots. My favorite MS software to illustrate screen shots was MS Powerpoint. As I could put two or more images next to each other, scale them up and make annotations, it saves the over complicated process of using an unfamiliar software to do so. 

The internet played a major role during this project. The website Blogger was essential for the coursework, keeping a track record of research, planning and most importantly the progress of the candidates. Youtube remains another important website as expected, with the youtube channels in place the popular music channels VEVO helped to get a feel for the genre we was going to explore. VEVO included other songs from the artist and similar songs alike. Despite researching on Wikipedia, this allowed me to simply click songs at random and get a feel and inspiration from the music videos without having to do heavy research on who is and who isn't an electropop artist. Facebook equally proved to be as important for feedback and I also used it for the first time to create and plan an event (the party). It allowed for all guests to know what the plans were especially if there was a change of plan as there was (see above screen shot).  The Blackberry mobile device also ensured everything went to plan in terms of the party, allowing for guests to communicate with the hosts and broadcast messages (send one message to a number of selected people on your contact list).  Conforming to our earlier observations of the music industry in rapid decline of legal sells , I used youtube converter to get some suggested songs from guests for the party. (It was for educational purposes :D) I then just put these songs on my Ipod touch and connected it to the aux wire of the stereo at the party.