Evaluation - Question 3

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

In this project we used many different technlogies to construct our media texts and music video and help plan and research for it. The main technology which we used were the 'Apple Mac' computers which held all the programmes for us to produce our music videos and digipaks.

Our main piece of equipment used was the state of the art video camera which we used to record clips for our music video. As we had already used this equipment last year there was really any new things to learn about the tools just refreshing our memory.

The digital cameras were used to take stills whilst we were filming to show our progress in making our music video and to take pictures for our digipaks. We were then able to develop the stills by putting them on a timeline to create a small clip of moving images.

ON SHOOT PHOTOS/VIDEO

Memory cards allowed us to record all our moving and still clips.
We then were able to transfer that information on to a hard drive by using a card reader. Our hard drives were very important in this project as they stored all of our research, planning and work. Also, without a hard drive we could not open final cut pro so it was essential that we had one with our clips, photos and work.

PHOTOSHOP

In this project, Photoshop played a major part in creating our ancillary texts (digipak and advertisements.). The variety of tools, effects and colours allowed me to be imaginative and help produce a media product of good quality which suited my genre of music - pop.

I cut out my image using the magic wand tool which eliminates the background scenery from the main image that you would like to keep. I then when to the drop down menu labelled 'Enhance'. This offered me a selection of choices that would enhance my image in one way or another. I then selected the option of 'Adjust Colour' and 'Colour Variation'.

A pop outbox then appeared which gave me the tools to help change the colour of the picture. It gave the option of increasing or decreasing the picture in colours of 'red, blue and green' and to lighten or increase darkness of the picture. Inorder to make the image pink, I clicked numerous times the increase 'red' and lighten tool. After, I increased 'blue' which made the image turn pink.

The new pink images placed with the originals goes with the girly colour theme of 'pink' and also is something different from the plain original image.

When creating my images out of the candycane picture, I began by enhancing the image as I did on the image above - turning the once red candy canes into pink ones.

This tool here is the cookie cutter tool. It allows us to cut our different shapes from images that we have already got. I selected the cookie cutter tool and a drop down list appeared which allowed me to select the shape I wanted to cut out.

There were many different shapes available, including food shapes, hearts, vehicles and many more. Through out my ancillary texts I used the heart, lips and candy cane cookie cutter shapes.

Once I selected a shape, I dragged the arrow over my image until it was the size that I wanted. When I clicked the select bar, I was left with my lips shape with a pink candy cane print fill.

I was then able to drag and drop this on my digipack and use it on my backcover. This is relatable to my music video, artist and genre as a whole because it is pink which makes it look very girly and stereotypical of a pop genre. Also, the candy canes is related to sweets which is a running theme throughout my project.

DIGITAL ANIMATIC STORYBOARD

Our animatic storyboard was easily created on photoshop. I basically took pictures of things that may appear in the actual music video and transferred them on final cut pro. I then put the original soundtrack onto the timeline and dragged images on the timeline on the places where we visioned them to appear. I dragged the images to make them appear longer or shorter depending on how long we wanted them to appear in the song for.

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTS

The internet played a major part in reasearch and planning of this project. It helped gather information such as the record label so that we could contact them to ask for permission and other pop videos and artists which we could get inspiration from.

youtube played an important part in our research for our media project. It helped us get links to professional music video and embed it on our blog. This helped us as we could then gain ideas from previous videos in our genre and use them in our own videos. 

Blogger was the foundation of our project. It allowed us to present all of our research, class tasks, show links, embed videos and present all our project (music video and digipak/poster). It helped us gather up all our reseaerch and planning which we were able to look back onto the get ideas for our music video when it came to producing it. Also, it was used to present our evaluation to show how things came together. Blogger allowed us to not just evaluate our work in plain text but use pictures, videos, links and more.

Final cut pro, again, was used to edit our music video. However, we used more complex tools this time as we had to make it appear that the artist in the video was singing the song from the soundtrack (by another artist). We did this by using the 'marker' tool. We did this by firstly 'marking' a specific word on the original soundtrack by holding down the letter 'm' when the word was sung. We found it easier to do this by looking at the audio waves of the song and then dragged the marked song onto the timeline. This then allowed us to mark every base track that we filmed with Bella. To do this we switched to the audio wave view of the video and 'marked' the word which was selected on the original soundtrack. Then we dragged it on to the timeline. We then muted those layers so that when played it appeared that Bella was singing the original song. If the video was not in synch with the soundtrack then we used the keys 'alt+arrows' to move it frame by frame until it was in synch. This created layers of numerous base tracks which we then cut at certain beats of the track by using the razor tool.

Powerpoint was used effectively to present our pitch. This was to show what we would be doing and how we would go about creating our music video. We then converted the pitch from powerpoint in to a quicktime file in order for it to be viewable on blogger.