Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction, research,

planning and evaluation stage?

Research and planning

Research was vital in creating a successful music video, with an effective Digipack and Advertisement. The internet provided us with all the resources we needed to help towards the stages of our production. We used the following technologies to research and plan out various tasks within our A2 coursework:

Google

• Google is an international search engine and is one of the most frequently used for thorough research and finding various pictures within my production. Google maps proved to be useful by allowing us to find certain locations suitable for our filming and browsing around the area.

• Below is a screen shot of one of the locations we found by searching on Google maps. The new updated street view allowed us to get a deeper insight towards potential locations so we could look for specific positive or negative features e.g. (are the locations suitable for this scene).

• YouTube is an online public communications site. The site allows for registered users to upload videos for the public to view and post comments about it.

• YouTube partook a crucial role towards the research and planning and evaluation stages of our production. It did so by allowing us to watch, research and analyse various videos we searched. Because I already had a registered account, I was able to upload the construction of our music video along with our finalised music video to allow it to spread worldwide enabling us to receive more feedback from the audience.

• When we watched the video “ Where Is The Love”, we realised that by looking at other suggested videos, this fitted into a range of different genres which were Hip-Hop/Rap and not one specific genre. By taking that into consideration we had to re-think who were the appropriate target audience would be towards this hip/hip and rap genre music video.

• Here is one of the video footages I recorded throughout the production. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNimnd19yTk&feature=channel_video_title

Blogger

• Blogger was perhaps the most important part of our coursework as this was where we published all of our coursework updates and progress such as construction, evaluation, locations, etc.

• Blogger also allowed us to express ourselves by creating individual opinions towards the coursework using multi-media to portray this such as uploading pictures, videos, radio broadcasts. It also lets you customises the background, templates etc to your liking.

• Also within the research and planning stages i used Slide-Share to create slideshows various pictures and answers to questions. Using Slide-Share added different multimedia towards my blog and creates a more exciting vibe rather than constant exam style written answers.

Phones• Another technology I used was my mobile phone. During the first stages

of my music production, I found it difficult to complete various research, organisations (e.g. Using filming equipment, shooting schedules etc.) and planning out of school, which lead me to use my mobile phone to continue with my work. I used my “ I phone 4” to complete such tasks as uploading videos onto social networking websites, YouTube and blogger. Not only that but because of the technical convergence, my iphone offered me many programmes which I used to take still pictures, videos and play music rather than having to take and carry large expensive equipment to every shooting of the production.

Construction

• During the stages of construction towards our coursework, we were given access to the school computers which were Macs. What made the Macs unique was their quick access to the internet which eased and increase the pace the process, and the usage of the editing programs :

• Adobe Photoshop• Adobe Premier Pro • Adobe After Effects • These software's created a significantly big impact on

the construction and editing of our music videos.

Camera• I used the Nikon coolpix L23 still camera (able to

shoot pictures at 14 megapixel) throughout the research/planning and construction stages of our production. This allowed me to take pictures of the cast, various digipak and magazine ideas, locations and the technologies used within the production. I found this technology to be extremely useful during the stages because of the size and weight made it easy and quick to use.

• We would usually take the photos outside of school therefore we had to use fire wire to transfer the photos and footage we did out of school onto the Mac computers. I struggled during the first few times however once I got round that stage I found it was very simple and a effective way of transfer our data.

• The filming equipment we used was a Panasonic NV-GS500 video camera. This not only filmed the shots we wanted but produced it at incredible resolution (720p) creating a clear image with very high frames per second allowing the sharpest result.

• The camera included a vast amount of settings allowing us to experiment the effects it could produce.

• To keep the shots we wanted steady we had to use the Velbon DV-6000 tripod. This kept our shots steady and fluent especially when it came to using panning and still shot towards our music video. This resulted in giving our finalised shot a more professional finishing look.

• However with such a good tripod came at a price which was that the shear weight of it made the whole process difficult and in some case ending up us not taking the tripod to the location simply because it was too heavy. Therefore we had to use a lot of handheld shots which when looking back felt it worked effectively anyway.

Adobe Premier Pro• For us to create a sequence of our footage for our music

video we had to use Adobe Premiere Pro. this allowed us to edit the video in much more detail than other programmes such a movie maker, edit our footages into a time sequence,

and add vast amounts of effects to our suiting into the video.This is the editing timeline used to create the video sequence

Speed durationOne of the effects we used to visibly change ourfootage was speed duration tool. This allowed us to effectively change the speed of our footage to either a faster or slower paced. We chose to use this effect to indicate in our video the passing of time which suited well with the fast tempo of our music song.

Drop shadow tool• One of the footage we took we wanted to try and experiment with and

create a black and white effect. We started off using the drop shadow tool which dimmed the colour contrast of the shot. After to even out the ratio of black to white we added a ‘dip to black’ GPU transition.

Adobe photoshop

• We used Adobe Photoshop CS3 to edit our images for our front, inside, back cover of our digipak and magazine advert to a professional standard. Photoshop provided us with various tools and effects to stylise our images to our liking.

Front cover of digipak• Photoshop played an important role particularly towards the titles on the

cover. We used the four stages to create our title which began with the stroke tool. This outlined the title in any colour to your liking. We admired this because it created a good contrast from the black but didn't overpower it giving it a more professional finish. We then used colour overlay which put a layer of colour over our picture. Finally we used two different shadow tools to produce a shadow effect on the titles. We decided to blur the shadow giving it a dim contrast which we felt worker well with the relation to the style of our music video.

Inside cover of digipak/magazine advert

• We chose not to use any tools towards our inside digipak however we used the same image again for our magazine advert. Our intention was to create a different image for the magazine advert compared to the digipak yet still using the same base picture. First, we used the history brush tool to create a dim grey background but keeping the artists in colour artist we were promoting therefore making them stand out. We then used tools to give the magazine advert a professional finish which included the same font ‘praetorian’ used for the digipak and created stars using the shapes tool to create a rating for our advert.

Back cover of digipak• When I took this photo for our back cover we immediately encountered

the problem of the date and time imprinted onto the photo. I therefore had to use the clone stamp tool to take part of the photo and use that to cover the imprint on the photo. Although I had to chose the patch to clone carefully so that there was no indication of the imprint which meant merging it together to ensure it didn't look out of place and unprofessional.

Da font• We used the website www.dafont.com which allowed us to choose

from thousands of different downloadable fonts for Photoshop varied from such fonts like gothic to techno.

• We decided to choose ‘Praetorian’ which we agreed suited well with style of the front cover digipak. We thought that the font was also very recognisable therefore we used it as one of the brand identities for our production.

Evaluation

• When evaluating our music video production i used similar media technologies such as the internet which included the websites blogger, YouTube, and Google. However these were all key aspect towards the research and information which showed just how useful and effective they are. I found them all very simple to use but helpful towards the evaluation questions.