Q2.) How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research

During the research process I have used several different pieces of software, both online and offline, to explore and present the different genres and their music video developments. These include: PowerPoint Blogger YouTube SurveyMonkey Prezi PowToonIn the following slides I’m going to be explaining why and how I’ve used these pieces of software to my advantage.

Research

Microsoft PowerPoint PowerPoint is a slideshow presentation programme developed by Microsoft and is

extremely useful for creating presentations based on a slide by slide format. It is for this reason that I used the software to present my research on the heavy metal genre, target audience and institutions. With the use of different slides and designs, I was able to create three different presentations which take the reader through the different steps of my research one slide at a time. Within the slides, I could include images of music videos and different institutional logos, as well as embed hyperlinks to certain music videos on YouTube to further explain the points I made.

.Hyperlink to YouTube Video

Images taken from the music video

Research

BloggerBlogger is an online blog publishing site owned by Google and it allows users to create several blogs free of charge. This is also the blogging site where all my work, from research to production and evaluations has been presented. Users can create single blog posts in which they can include images, videos and hyperlinks. Each blog post is then published and they appear in chronological order on the live blog. Whilst carrying out my research I decided to create several blog posts, all incorporating the use of images, videos and hyperlinks to some extent. My indie genre discussion, song choice research and final decision and location research were all presented on Blogger for the simple reason that in enabled me to confidently and appropriately use the input of videos and hyperlinks of and to music videos on YouTube. The fact the blog posts all appear in chronological order from the date they were published also enabled me to keep in check of what blog posts were completed and when in relation to my research.

Hyperlink to YouTube Video

Images taken from the music video for Arctic Monkeys analysis

Research

SurveyMonkeySurveyMonkey is a piece of online software which allows users to develop, create and analyse their own surveys. This form of survey is particularly useful and effective as it can be shared on social medias to large audiences simply with a web link. Participants then follow the link to the online survey where they complete up to 10 questions on a certain topic. In my case the topic was target audience and I was researching what audiences of different genres expected from the genre in terms of music videos and the artists themselves in the form of 10 questions, varying from open and closed questions. Once I had a sufficient number of people answering my survey I went to the analyse section of the site and looked at all the different answers given by the participants and found a number of trends within the data. I then took screenshots of the results graphs and inserted them onto my target audience PowerPoint where I explained them and how I was going to incorporate the results into my planning and final product.Having used this piece of software in AS media, I was assured in how to confidently create an effective survey using the software and all it’s features.

Survey Survey analysis page

Research

PreziPrezi is a similar piece of software to PowerPoint in that they are both slide-based presentations, however Prezi is online and presents the slides in a story-telling format. With Prezi being an online software, it is desirable in comparison to PowerPoint as you can easily embed videos and hyperlinks to each slide accordingly; hence why I used Prezi to present my research on record label logos and other student videos. Although having used Prezi before, putting together my presentation on record label logo research was the first time I could confidently create a simple and basic Prezi presentation. By simple, I mean that it consisted of five slides and no images or hyperlinks. I did however work out how to change the design of the presentation and how to adjust the route of the presentation and add in slides. Having practiced using the basic features of Prezi in my first presentation, I decided to see if I could extend my skills by creating another Prezi on the analysis of other student videos. I chose a more complicated design for this presentation and changed the colour scheme also. The presentation consisted of two main slides and each slide had three slides branching off from it. On each main slide I embedded the two student videos from YouTube using the “Insert” button.

First Prezi

Developed Prezi with embedded video

Research

PowToonPowToon is an online animation software which enables users to make their own animated videos and presentations. Unlike Prezi, PowToon allows you to add music to your presentation, giving it a more video-like feel. Just like PowerPoint and Prezi, you create the video slide by slide until you end up with a completed video which you can upload to YouTube, view online and embed into blog posts.I decided to make a PowToon video of the pictures of our possible locations for the music video, as it would create a visual representation of the places I was describing in my blog post.

Research

YouTubeYouTube is the most predominant online video sharing website where users can engage with the video and it’s uploader by liking, sharing and commenting on it. With YouTube getting a total of 3.5 billion hours of videos watched each month, the platform has an extremely large audience and their engagement reflects this. Because of this, most artists upload their music videos onto YouTube where a large audience will engage with their works and increase awareness towards the artist.Therefore, when analysing music videos both during the genre discussion and the analysis of other student videos this is where I inserted them from. Furthermore, when I created the video on PowToon for location research I uploaded it to YouTube so I could then import it over onto blogger easily.

Research

SlideShareSlide Share is a website where users can upload documents such as PowerPoints, Word documents and PDF’s. Once uploaded to the website, uploaders can share their documents to be viewed online or the document can then be embedded into Blogger which is what I have done with all the PowerPoint’s I’ve created throughout research up to production and evaluations.

Planning

Planning

Lip Syncing Test For the lip syncing test we had to film someone lip

syncing to a song, and so we needed to use a camera. Myself and Holly had only filmed once before during our filming for our foundation portfolio and so our knowledge was very limited However, we were able to confidently film the test.

After filming, we uploaded the footage onto iMovie so we could edit the audio to fit the lip syncing, something which we already had knowledge of how to do from our AS thriller opening. iMovie is Apple’s video editing software which allows users to import their videos and photos from a hard drive and then add titles, themes, music and effects as well as colour correct and transitions if wanted. As this was simply the lip syncing test it wasn’t necessary to use these extra features.

Following the editing, we uploaded the video to YouTube as this was the quickest and most effective way to upload videos to Blogger.

Planning

Screen Test Shots Camera:- In order to get screen test shots of our possible actors we had to use a camera to take the shots. We used the camera which we would be filming the music video with, and as it had different settings we could experiment with which produced the best picture which gave us an idea as to how the quality would turn out during the actual filming.

Production

Production

Nikon B500 The camera we used was the Nikon

B500 as we believed this camera would give us the best quality as it had several settings we could use to our advantage. This was the camera we used for filming the entire performance element of the video and I was very pleased with the overall quality of the footage.

Production

iMovieAs noted before, iMovie is Apple’s own video editing software and is the piece of software we primarily used to edit our music video. Although it may not be considered the most advanced video editing software, as we were confident with using the software and it’s different features we felt it was best to use it to our advantage. Once we had the footage and audio imported in, the next step was getting the lip syncing shots in time with the audio. We then used the colour correction feature to change all the shots to black and white. On the memories sections of the music video, we had an overlay downloaded from YouTube and we inputted this on top of the green screen which was cut away from the shot using the green screen feature on iMovie. Furthermore, as we had audio from another video which we were using before the official music audio came in we had to make sure the music transitioned smoothly from one audio to another, which we did successfully as we had previous experience in doing this from previous coursework.As a whole, I believe we used iMovie to our advantage by using a wide range of it’s features to compliment our work.