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

Publisher

This Program is a package in the Microsoft office software. It is a popular program to make presentational documents, as it is easy to create with and is a user friendly program. As soon as you open it up you are immediately asked what publication you want to create and if you want a template to follow. The templates are normal publication documents like leaflet, memorandums, letter, poster etc...

Through my school years I have always used this program when necessary. I used the program this year in Media Studies to create a group task of producing a case study leaflet on a magazine. Lewis Tillyer and I based our study on Kerrang! The second time I used it was when I created my final versions of the front cover, contents page and double page spread. I used it only to fix the documents up together because it was easy to do with this program, as the images were automatically defaulted with the square wrapping. Without this program I would have struggled to put all my final pieces together efficiently.

When using this program I had a problem that frustrated me quite a bit. I set the background to black and when I printed it out it wouldn’t show. My diagnosis on this small dilemma was that the 2003 version of publisher was confused with the 2007 version I made on my laptop and it just wasn’t able to process the command.

To overcome this problem I simply drew a box spanning the page, filled it in black then right clicked it at sent it to back of the page. This then acted as a background colour. Overall it wasn’t the end of the world and it appeared the same as it would have been.

Fireworks

Macromedia fireworks is a program that I have worked with before in previous years at Sponne in different subjects. This program is manly for manipulating images for editing purposes. This program is very expensive to buy and so I can’t afford to have it my laptop.

Fireworks can manipulate images by cutting out sections manually or with the magic wand which selects the entire colour you just clicked on. This is useful when taking away part of images. It can do more, including changing colour schemes, overlapping images and changing scale.

I used it to edit my photos by greyscaling, changing brightness levels, contrasting and cutting parts of images out.

A problem that I remember was when a saved over the original photo, I realised shortly after I didn’t mean to do that.

I overcame the problem by copying it of a backup folder I made earlier on and recovered the file, which I was then able to manipulate.

Blogger.com

This program is the electronic medium that we had the choice of doing as electronically storing our media folder of our production task. This program is designed for social interaction and is where the user can post a status for anybody to see.

This program overwhelmed me in shock of how confusing it was. It was a totally new experience for me and it took me a while to adapt. For me the hardest part was login on, mainly because you had to enter your email address every time when trying to sign in. To over come this though I ingeniously copied the address when I was on my blogger account and simply created a shortcut icon on my desktop, were I pasted the address of my blog in. This feature I did at home because the school computers restrict everybody from doing such things. This enabled me to enter my blog without any stress and continue typing up my blog.

Camera

This technology I used to take photos for my production. I am experienced with a camera as I have been open to the technology since the digital age arrived. However there were something’s new I learnt. This was to compose shots and set the camera to the close up mode. The close up button focuses on the closer objects the most and so I thought it was appropriate to set it to this setting because we were told that the shot type must by a close up to a mid shot. I had access to a tripod what helped me dearly when composing shots of myself. The tripod enable the hold in a position and in an angle.