Evaluation Question 3

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

Music Video

Research

At this stage the main sites that I used were Youtube, Vimeo, Google. I used the Google search engine to gain greater understanding and more information about the theories than what I learnt in class. Youtube was use to look at videos which linked to the theories and to gain ideas from existing music videos to use in my own. I also used Vimeo to look at previous student work in the same way.
Planning

Animatic: The animatic was a good way to structure the music video so we'd know which type of shots would be used at a certain point of the song and also the mise en scene and camerawork.We didn't use actual images for the animatic but hand drawn images (courtesy of Anthony).
Digital Storyboard (Quark): We used images to create a storyboard with details of the types of shots, location and camerawork.

 










Construction
Camera (+ memory cards): We had the opportunity of working with professional, state of the art JVC camera's provided by the media department. This piece of technology was very important in the construction of our music video as if we did not have them we wouldn't have been able to make our music video. We used them to film our footage for our music video at the Barbican. At first, most of our footage were normal shots and cutaways instead of base tracks but after we realised we shot quite a few base tracks. All of this footage saved onto the memory cards and later transferred and saved onto our hard drives.

Sony still camera and Flip Cam: These 2 technologies were used mainly for behind the scenes to provide visual evidence of our filming sessions and how they went and what we actually did on the days we went out to film.

Final cut pro: We used Final Cut pro during the editing process of the music video. The footage that we shot using the cameras was transferred onto final cut and we went through and chose the shots we wanted and that looked the best. We had base tracks as well as cutaways and they were both used to create a sequence and cut accordingly to add structure to the music video and put the right shots in the right place.  When placed onto the sequence they were layered in the style of base track editing.We also used final cut for colour correction to bring out our make up and jewellery and we added slow motion to some sections of our music video.

Ancillary products

Research
Google search engine: This is the main way I researched digipaks and advertisements to gain ideas for my own and to be analytic of others.
Planning: Looking at pre-existing digipaks by previous media students through the blog and looking at actual digipaks by searching on google images to look at typical pop digipaks and advertisements so that I can use that in the construction of my own.. Also using external websites like dafont.com to try and find a font for my digipak. We also did a photo shop exercise in class recreating a digipak for photoshop practice and to be familiar with the conventions and the do's and don'ts of digipak and advertisements.
Construction
Canon: We used a professional canon camera to take pictures for our digipak and advertisement.
Photoshop:For my digipak I used a template to create a four panel digipak. I added the colour I wanted for my background (black) and then my font (fonts from photoshop).All the images that I used I didn't add any effects as I thought I didn't need to add any. The cd was created using the shape took and adjusted the opacity so that the image on the back would be visible and the hole in the cd was created (with the help of Trevor) cut out tool in photoshop.

Blogger (research, planning and evaluation)
Blogger was a good way for us to keep track of our work, for the teachers too and also a way to present my work in a more creative way. Using blogger I was able to create detailed posts on research, planning and evaluation, not only written posts but using external sites like: prezi (powerpoint), animoto, slide.ly and gifs (to present images rather than just posting them) go animate (animation). Also added video's filmed using the flip cam, especially at evaluation stages when we're getting feedback from others.

Social Networking (Twitter & Instagram)
We used twitter so that our teachers can keep track of us while filming and also as a way to engage with possible fans/ to gain fans by talking about what the Candi hearts are doing and getting into character of being a girl band. We also used instagram to put up pictures of our prodction