Evaluation:Question 4

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

Research

We have used quite a lot of technology this year in media in preperation for this we did some practice with cameras, lip syncing and we made a short music video, however this was a controlled process, using Adobe Premiere Pro gave us some knowledge of the technology we were going to use.

 I used media 2.0 in the form of facebook and youtube, we used facebook in order to keep contact with our artist, this is also how we found our dancer. Using yahoo email she sent us a recording of her dancing so that we could decide if we wanted to include her. Facebook also allowed us to get feedback on our work. Social networking sites allowed us to have access to a wide audience and to create groups specifically for our media. Youtube is where we watched similar music videos and where we uploaded our own so that other people could watch it. The internet was my main source for my research in my blog, it gave me access to a wide range of materials that helped me when looking at my genre and other artists. We downloaded the song from Soundcloud which is where the artist uploads all his music this was easy to do and did not take very long. Soundcloud can be accessed by anyone and we found it through google.

In my blog i have used media such as prezi.com which i used to display my work in a different way. I also used slide share, this gave me the ability to upload my powerpoints onto my blog which was another way of displaying my research. These sights allow me to learn more about media and different, more interesting ways of displaying it.

Planning

I used a canon digital camera to photograph my artist for the digipak, as I am a photography student I already know how this works so I was in control. I used an auto focus setting so that the pictures were in focus and not blurry. I instructed the artist on how to sit,stand and pose as i had previously planned my digipak so i knew what i was capturing. Planning this allowed me to be very time efficeint and did not take very long, this meant i had enough time to edit my photos and create my promotional package.

In Photoshop i already have a few years of experience i decided i was going to layer photographs and change the opacity to have a movement effect. I opened the photos i planned to use and changed them all to black and white. From here i layered one on top of the other and changed their opacity to hard light. Then i changed the amount of opacity on each layer that was on top so that you could see the effect of movement. On top i added another effect of glowing edges to make it stand out more and give an added effect. I did the same on the back cover using pictures of the artist raising their arms. I added text on Photoshop and added my bar code by making one on the internet and adding it onto my digipak. The advertisement was made by increasing the saturation on the colour, in the shoot i took a series of photos of the artist turning slightly. By layering these photographs it gave an effect of him turning round. Layering and changing opacity levels allowed me to show this and this was the image i used on my advert.

Production

We have used Panasonic HD DV cameras, in order to know how to work this we did look at the instruction manual. This helped us when filming outdoors. And gave us more information on how to use the camera we did this to avoid any disruptions when we were out filming. It helped us to be more knowledgeable and efficient if something went wrong with the camera in the filming process.

On Amy's iphone we used the ipod to play the track to the artists and the dancer so that they could perform their parts, specifically we used the play and rewind buttons which was very simple as we have both used this device before. Doing this helped to be more convenient when filming the music video. The iphone also allowed us to keep in contact with the artist as it gave us access to facebook and other social devices.

Media on the computer that we have used includes Adobe Premiere Pro, based on the fact I did Media AS I have already learnt the basics of using Premiere, adding the effects was something we had to work out and our previous lip sync activity taught me how to do this aspect. To add the black and white effect we went on video effects, image control and then using the cursor we dragged the effect over the clip we wanted it on, we had to do this for every clip and then render the timeline in order for it to play. We did have some problems in the process, we had times when the video froze and the sound stopped however when we exported the video these problems didn't return. Unfortunately it just made the editing a bit more difficult.