Evaluation Question 4

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

As a group we discovered the impracticality of low cost digital recorder cameras with the down sides being: low quality images (usually around 320p resolution), short battery life spans and often awkward controls such as the DXG series of camcorders. With the recent phenomenon of high quality camera phones becoming widely available we decided to utilize the iPhone 6s+ which boasts a 4K front camera.

Finding a way to steady the phone to the quality of the camera on a tripod was at first a challenge after taking initial shots free-hand, believing that there wasn't an alternative. Although, the shots still made it to the final cut of the video, taking them proved difficult and we worried about maintaining a high level of quality for each take.

Strangely, it was a disdain for the selfie-stick fad that gave us an idea to use the attachment phone-grip to hold the mobile and attach it to the tripod with the hope that it would be compatible with a tripod. We bought a selfie-stick and removed the phone attachment to find that it fits perfectly within the tripod jack. This effectively saved our piece and enabled us to take high quality shots with a steady foundation.

As we had chosen to use an iPhone to take the shots we needed, rather than transfer the contents to a computer to use more conventional software such as Sony Vegas, we used an application called Splice that acts the same as the Apple own video software: iMovie. Using this, it prevented us from spending large amounts of time transferring large amounts of data which would have been a challenge in itself with email size restrictions.

The sites we used were Blogger, for all of our research and planning and YouTube to publish and embed videos. To use Blogger, we needed to have a basic understanding of HTML 5 coding language, which we used to embed links and focus on specific commands when creating posts. 

We used the WIX website builder to create our own website about the digipak which required us to use advanced YouTube settings to embed and link our video. Furthermore, we used Photoshop to create a still of our video to use as a back ground for the website and create synergy between our products.