A range of programs and websites that we used to create our media texts
(Facebook, Scribd, YouTube, Photoshop CS5, Cyberlink YouCam, Blogger & Adobe Premiere Pro)
New media technologies had a huge effect for us in terms of editing, For our AS year, despite working in separate groups- both me and Dora used iMovie and we both found it more suited to edit videos of family ski holidays rather that A-level Media Studies coursework. Therefore we made the decision to swap to Adobe Premiere Pro, a program that I used at GCSE- this would have allowed us to edit the film accurately, cutting clips by each millisecond as well as providing a wealth of features to touch up the lighting and vibrancy of our footage. To create visually impressive artwork for our ancillary tasks- we both needed to learn to use Adobe Photoshop CS5-this proved very tricky and we were very slow getting started on our ancillary tasks as a result of this! However, once we had dedicated a few lessons to improving our skills- we came on really quickly and edited some beautiful photos to use in our ancillary task. Also, shooting our photos in RAW format allowed any colour corrections to be made with ease and gave us a very high quality photograph overall.
Before Photoshop CS5:
After Photoshop CS5: 
The Internet also had a huge effect on our media products. Here we could promote Parisienne Records, find out for information about our target audience, display our video and house all of our research in a very efficient and professional blog. We used Blogger, a (would you believe it...) blogging site to create a media hub where we could display all of our research, drafts, pictures, filming logs in one place that was accessible to everyone and very easily edited. This was very useful when it came to presenting questionnaire results as graphs. All of these aspects of blogging were very useful and a complete godsend to two Drama students like Dora and I who have spent approximately half of our lives faffing around with ring binders and plastic wallets to display our coursework. As a result, we were more organised and efficient workers with a clear concept of time management, as everything was laid out in front of us and easy to reach. Also, Dore and I also ventured into vlogging territory through the use of recording programs like Cyberlink YouCam (here is an example vlog). This modern way of documenting progress gave our blog a multimedia feel and was also much more fun to do than type out paragraphs of text!
As we were surrounded by our target audience, we didn't use the Internet so much for interacting with our target audience as we found a 'DIY' approach of going up and talking to people more effective. However, the Internet was was very important in finding out more about our target audience. For example, we could use 'facebook stalking' to great effect by checking out the profiles of people who had 'liked' Kate Nash's facebook page and see what other types of music they were into we could also do a similar thing with the 'suggestions' bar on YouTube where we were given a list of similar videos from similar artists- this allowed us to also get a better understanding of the female solo artist genre so we could find out the conventions, and follow and challenge them where we saw fit.
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