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

Throughout producing my A2 practical production piece me and my group had to use many media technologies in order to produce a good effective music video.
Firstly, the planning stage involved using key conventions that would appeal to our target audience and make the genre of our music video stand out and be easily recognisable. In order for this to happen we had to research into existing media products using the Internet as our main resource to access sites such as 'Youtube.com'. The Internet came in very handy and it allowed us to research more information about the band (The Saturdays) in a lot more detail using sites such as 'Google.com' in our researching stage. The use of the Internet was extremely useful because it allowed us as a group to see and analyse the clear conventions that are typically found in a pop genre music video. It also helped us to see what kind of images The Saturdays and other girl bands bring across to their target audience, such as using bright colours to stand out but feminine revealing images to bring across a seductive female image.
Photoshop and the editing software was a main resource that me and my group used throughout the process of producing our music video and anciliary tasks. Photoshop allowed us to edit and improve the layout of our images. By using this software it allowed us to adjust the brightness, contract, size and position etc of our images to make them look more professional and appealing. This was the software that we used to create our CD cover and magazine advertisement as it allowed us to add in text, change font styles and colours and adjust the size of the font in order for it to follow the codes and conventions of existing CD covers and magazine advertisements. As a group we found using photoshop was a easy and very effective resource to use because it was less time consuming and gave us the freedom to be creative with our work. Another resource we used was the editing software which allowed us to add in special effects to our music video such as slow motion and zoom. This software also allowed us to improve the continuity of our video and create a smooth flowing video when cutting from shot to shot. The editing software was also a resource that allowed us to be very creative with our music video, by adding in different effects it spices up the video and makes it more interesting and appealing for our audience to watch.
Social networking sites such as 'Facebook.com' and 'Myspace.com' and also 'Youtube.com' have been very useful during the evaluation stage of our practical because it allowed us to gain audience feedback about both our main practical and anciliary tasks. By gaining audience feedback it allowed me and my group to look in depth at any areas that needed improving or tweaking. By having the freedom to upload our work so quickly onto sites such as youtube and facebook and recieve instant comments from a large group of people was very useful when producing our music video as it allowed us to recieve ideas and opinions about our work. We expressed our ideas on facebook to recieve audience feedback on what they thought about our ideas and if we could do anything to our work to improve it to make more appealing. This was definitely a good and very useful idea to do because the feedback we recieve helped us to improve our work to the best standard we possibly could as a group.