Evaluation - Question Six

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the process of construction of my Media Product, I have made use of a wide range of technologies that allowed me to put my creative ideas into practise. Using a combination of Hardware and Software, that will be detailed in this post, my music magazine was completed to the standard that it has been. Below you can see a WallWisher wall that has been created with the help of my classmates that lists all (and I mean all) of the technologies that all of us have used during this course. To save the length of this post, I have only detailed the technologies that I have personally used.

Adobe Photoshop CS4

The first piece of Software that I was taught during this course was Adobe Photoshop CS4 (right), an image manipulation program created by Adobe. This piece of Software comes equipped with a number of tools that proved to be useful during the construction phase, as it allowed me to change the opacity of images, apply layer effects such as Glows and Strokes to my image and text layers, apply visual filters such as Motion Blurs and an effect named "Poster Edges", and many more highly useful effects that are available only to Photoshop. If I was to use a different program for the manipulation of my images and the creation of both my Front Page and Contents Page, I wouldn't have been able to create such advanced visual effects in the way that Photoshop allows me too. For example, if I were to use a program like Microsoft Paint (left), I wouldn't have been able to apply even the simplest of effects such as an Outer Glow or a Drop Shadow. Even applying a Stroke would be very difficult in Microsoft Paint, and it would be impossible to apply a filter to the image such as a Blur or Sharpen. The lack of a transparent background in Microsoft Paint also means there will be little control over the background of my music magazine as well. So as you can see, Adobe Photoshop is the more sensible choice of image manipulation Software.

Adobe InDesign CS4

When we began working on our Double Page Spread articles, we were introduced to Adobe InDesign (right), a piece of publication Software that can be used to create magazine articles and other forms of print media. InDesign wasn't available to me when I was working on my Preliminary Task since we used it solely for our Double Page Spread, so we had to learn how to use this piece of Software for our Main Task. The main attraction to using InDesign for my Double Page Spread came from its Text Wrap tool, allowing me to easily designate an area that I wanted my text to wrap around, such as an image or a separate piece of text. This feature is somewhat absent in Microsoft Publisher, another piece of publication software that I could have used for my Double Page Spread. If I did choose to use Microsoft Publisher over Adobe InDesign I would have struggled to replicate an effective Text Wrap effect without taking a lot of time to do so. Another useful tool available in Adobe InDesign is the ability to define the number of columns in the article, and InDesign automatically sets up a document with these preferences. In Publisher this would have to be done using text boxes which would of course take up a lot of time.

A Nikon Coolpix S3100 Compact Camera

This was the camera that I used to take the pictures that I will later use for my Front Page, Contents Page and Double Page Spread, and this shirt pocket-sized camera has many useful features that I used to make sure my images where taken in the best possible quality. Arguably the most useful feature was the automatic scene-selector that has been built into the camera, allowing the camera to select which scene mode (out of 18 different settings) would best suit the mise-en-scene, shot composition and the mode of address present in my scene. Without this feature at my disposal my photoshoot would have taken a considerably longer time to get the required shots and I doubt my photos would have been in the same quality as they are now. This particular camera also has a 5x Optical Zoom, 4 means of reducing the blur of an image, an Electronic Vibration Reduction and even a Skin Softening feature to reduce the appearance of uneven skin tonnes. All of these features together helped to ensure that my pictures were as high quality as possible, and without these tools at my disposal my pictures would have appeared grainy, blurry and unsuitable for use in my Media Product.

Blogger

Finally, there is Blogger. This online tool is what gave me the ability to keep an archive of my work online in the form of a blog, without the need for a physical folder with print-outs of my work-in-progress. Blogger has many tools and features that I have utilised to make my blog easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and above all to a quality that matches my media product. The ability to assign Labels to a post allowed me to create a list of links that made my blog much easier to navigate, and the automatic sort feature that blogger uses (newest posts appear at the top) made it much easier to set out my work in a professional order and ensure my work effectively archived. Without these capabilites I would have had to print of all of my work and archive it by hand in a folder with the use of dividers. This would have taken up a lot of time that could be better spent working on the content itself, and I am grateful to be given the opportunity to save time using Blogger to having to archive my work by hand.