G324 - Evaluation Question 4

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

During the research stage of our music video we mainly used the internet. This was to research music video theories, to look at the current top music videos to discover why they're in the list of top music videos. It was also used to watch music videos from the same genre as In Blue Skies and to view news and reviews on other music videos. To watch the music videos we used YouTube.

YouTube was fantastic as it allowed us to watch the music videos as many times as we needed/wanted to, and also to see how other people have responded to the videos using the comments section, the amount of views the video has received and the number of likes compared to dislikes. From all of this, we could draw our own conclusions of what to include in our music video and what audiences would be interested in.

When planning we mainly used Blogger as all of our coursework is written up and posted onto our individual and group blogs. This allows us to demonstrate our progress throughout creating our music video in a type of visual diary way, showing each stage of the process as it happens and how each stage helps us continue with our work.



IMovie was used when creating our animatic storyboard as we wanted to use an editing software that we already understood so that the task could be completed quickly. We know how to work IMovie after editing our AS Level projects on this software. To practice and improve our lip-syncing abilities we filmed a short snippet of someone miming to a song, (including a shot change) using a SONY video camera.

This was edited using Final Cut Express as we knew this would be the software we’d use for our final video and we wanted to practice using it.
 

SONY Cyber-Shot DSC-HX200V

During construction we used two different cameras (SONY NEXC3  and a SONY Cyber-Shot DSC-HX200V). These two cameras film at a high quality and belonged to members of our group. The reason we used our own cameras was because we understood how they worked and it also gave us more freedom when deciding on dates and times to film as we’d have our own equipment at any time (including large tri-pods that were simple to use and made it possible for us to get higher angled shots that we could not have achieved without the use of these tri-pods). The high quality of these cameras helped us gain a high standard look on our footage as it was clear, even when put to full screen on the large Mac monitors we were editing on.

SONY NEXC3

When filming the performance shots of In Blue Skies we wanted them to look as professional as we could make them. This was done by using a professional lighting rig surrounding the band. We could adjust the brightness of each of these lights individually in order to get the look that we wanted on camera. When editing our music video we used Final Cut Express as it produces high-quality, professional looking videos and is an industry standard editing software. As footage is put into Final Cut Express it has to be rendered before it can be played, with lengthy amounts of footage this can often take a long time. However, we quickly worked out a simple way of getting around this problem as we selected the section of the clip that we wanted before rendering it, by using Quicktime playback first to find which section we needed.










To speed up the editing process we would first watch the chosen footage using QuickTime Playback in order to find the specific section we wished to use. We could then render that chosen section only (which is then quicker as there is less footage to render) to put into our video. Photoshop CS6 was used to edit our ancillary tasks (Magazine Advertisement and Digipak) to a high standard. 









I will be presenting my evaluations in several different ways. This is to demonstrate that I have broad skills when using technology.

For this  Evaluation (question 4) I decided to use a blog post because I believed that this particular question would be best presented through showing example pictures/videos alongside a description or explanation of why this was used throughout the research, planning and evaluation stages. This is a clear way to show the thought process and reasoning behind each media technology that I used.

For another of my evaluations (question 3) I will be creating a presentation using Prezi. This is because Prezi is a website which is very user friendly and I have used it before for other subjects. Also, as a way of presenting information, Prezi is interactive for the user and can link points together well. The evaluation i created a Prezi for is about the significance of audience feedback, presenting it in this way easily demonstrated the flow of changes from our first ideas through to our final decisions as a group, due to the received audience feedback.

I made two video evaluations (one was a directors commentary, the other was a commentary over our work compared with some real media texts). These questions had a lot of information to put into them and many examples that had to be included. So i decided that a video would be the most understandable and clear way to present these evaluations (question 1 and 2). I could also easily show which section of our music video I'm talking about in my commentary as I can cut and move the clip of footage to be paired with a specific section of the commentary.