JW - Evaluation Question Six

What Have You Learnt About Technologies From The Process Of Constructing This Product?

Throughout the whole process of making our media production, me individually and my team as a group have used an exceedingly wide range of different types of technologies, ranging from keyboards to high-tech software on the apple macs.

As a group, our work mainly was on the macs, using a variety of programmes. These included imovie, livetype, and several others. Imovie was the most important application we used on the mac, this is because all of our editing for our production took place on this application. We have most definitely logged most hours on this application; editing our clips, uploading footage, adding soundtracks, adding transitions etc. This application is very used friendly and you can easily do what you need.

During research and planning, the main technologies used was indeed this blog (to add posts, look at existing blogs etc) and also watching dvds of existing media products, primarily horror/slasher films. However, the most important aspect of media and technology I used was the internet. On this, I visited an extremely large variety of websites (from imdb, youtube, wikipedia and many more).

One of my most important tasks that I challenged independently was to create the soundtrack for our media production. This was done using a variety of musical instruments (including keyboards and guitars) to gain a variety of sounds that would sync in well together. I also used an audio recorder to record the various tracks I thought up. This was done in the very simple process of just playing the instrument live to it. I then uploaded the tracks to application on the apple macs called garage band. On here, I was then able to trim the tracks down to appropriate sizes, add multiple tracks and also alter the pitch of certain songs. Here is a video of me playing my keyboard at home, the track I'm playing is a short cover of the introduction of Don't Stop Believin - Journey.

I believe that if were to use technology from a decade ago, I personally would have found it very stressful because technology in general back then, was a lot slower. It also wouldn't have been as hi-tech as today's, and also there wouldn't has been a wide range. Finally, we have full use of the internet with broadband, this would not have been available to us ten years ago. This idea is summed beautifully by Jonathan Stark on his website www.jonathanstark.com, his quote is:

'The biggest technology change of the last 10 years is the proliferation of the internet into mainstream society. It started with the widespread adoption of email. From that modest foothold, the internet grew to become what it is today: the de-facto medium for human communication.'

To conclude, I feel that me and my group have used the resources available to us very well, we have used very different applications on the macs, our own individual computers to complete tasks (eg. uploading videos to youtube) and also used slightly more unusual techniques (ie. the musical instruments) to achieve our desired production. However, I do not feel that as a group, we used other individual's knowledge as well as we could have, never really ventured outside our group's individual talents.
Perhaps we should have gained more information from other students or teachers on the best way to use the technology available to us.