Q4. How did you integrate technologies – software, hardware and online in this project?

Over the recent years, there has been an enormous amount of improvement and advancements in
technology. These advancements have changed the way media texts are produced and perceived.
Our generation is the one of digital natives and everything has been made available to us online
unlike ever before. With these advancements, producing texts that would have taken days and
extreme effort by a professional to produce are produced within a few hours by an amateur. With
these technological advancements, producing media texts can be done quickly and efficiently by
many people. Technologies to produce these media texts such as laptops, cameras, phones etc.
have become widely available and much cheaper than before. These technologies with the help
of platforms such as YouTube, which serve as a guide, enable millions of people to produce
texts.

Technology played a vital role in our project. We used technology every step of the way from
planning pre-production to updating our blogs and post-production.

Weebly was used constantly throughout the project, and even once we had made our final
project, to track our progress. It acted as an online journal where all the information to track
progress from start to finish is available. We used websites such as Adobe Sparks, Prezi,
Emaze, and Scribd to make presentations on a number of topics as well as upload documents
onto our blog. I also used YouTube to upload videos onto the blog by embedding them. A
number of websites such as Wikipedia, SlideShare and others were used to gather information
on various topics such as audience theories and genre conventions of music.

Apps like WhatsApp played an important role in every step of production as it enabled Fateh
and I to communicate with each other as well as our actors. Google maps helped us find
locations we were familiar with and local taxi apps such as Careem helped us book rides to take
us from one location to the next with ease. Google helped me immensely as without it, I would
not have been able to research and gain knowledge on the different aspects of my project, for
example, in depth research on sexual abuse.
We used two cameras in our production, a Canon EOS 800D and a Nikon D7500. These
cameras were used for all the footage in the final video as well as the photoshoots for the artist.
We recorded footage into SD cards which Fateh later backed up into a hard drive after every
shoot incase an issue occurred with any of our SD cards. We also used my iPhone 6 to take
behind the scenes pictures and time lapses which were later uploaded onto our blog. Since we
were only two people in one group, we used the self-timer feature on the iPhone on many
occasions as well as the time lapse option, making a tripod ourselves by stacking books or
candles on top of each other and taking videos. A tripod for our cameras also assisted in stable
shots and tungsten lights were extremely important and helpful, especially when shooting
inside, as without them our footage was too dark or too grainy. A combination of these different
technologies led to high quality production.

Fateh used Adobe Premier Pro CC to edit the music video and the website wix.com to build
our artist’s website as it is advertised as extremely user friendly.

In charge of making the logo, I decided to ask a teacher of mine to write the calligraphy by hand
as I could not find a font that I liked online even though I researched many platforms such as the
Arabic writing fonts in Adobe Photoshop as well as websites such as UrbanFonts.com. I traced
his calligraphy with a black marker to make it darker, scanned it and send the picture to myself
through Gmail. I then used the pen tool to select the calligraphic letters and delete the white
background.
I emailed myself the logo and used Photoshop Mix and Snapseed, apps found on the App Store
to complete my logo. I refined the letters through PhotoShop mix, and edited the picture on
Snapseed, making the logo extremely dark and opaque. I also shifted the angle of the words and
added the text Raza selected from Snapseed.
I also used both of these apps to make the entire Digipak. I selected pictures from our photoshoot
and imported them into these apps, switching between both constantly, depending on the certain
features of each app. Photoshop Mix had a variety of more fonts and I was able to use Adobe
Photoshop Mix features such as the pen tool to cut and place objects as well as transfer more
than one image and attach it to another, for example adding the picture of the logo onto the
digipak. I used Snapseed on many occasions to change the opacity and colours of texts and the
blurring feature as well. I used both apps to edit the pictures that I used.
For the Urdu writing on the back cover, I wrote the names of the tracks on my notes and copied and
pasted them onto Snapseed. I used both Snapseed and Photoshop Mix for the texts as the fonts
available on Snapseed looked better when converted to Urdu than those in Photoshop Mix, but the
fonts in Photoshop Mix were better for English text.
I imported the final pictures and emailed them to Fateh and myself so that the highest quality of
pictures were being uploaded onto the blog.

Overall, digital technology was vital for my entire project as it has become vital in our daily life. Without
these applications and websites, I would not have been able to produce any of my own media texts and
publish them online.