Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research and Planning

The majority of the media technology used in the research and planning stage of the task was based around Blogger. Using Blogger was incredibly useful, as it meant that all of my personal research was available to me at an instant as it was all saved online. For example, when filming the music video, I was able to instantly access my storyboard as I had it saved onto Blogger, saving me from carrying around a paper storyboard which could easily be damaged or lost. In addition to this, it made posting multimedia content a lot more efficient, as I could easily integrate video, pictures, graphs and text. However, a weakness of Blogger is the lack of ability to back up any work which is saved on it - this means that everything I had researched was at risk of being lost if the system was to fail. When analysing various music videos in order to spot the features which make them effective and popular, I primarily used YouTube, as this integrates well with Blogger in order to allow videos to be embedded to analyse them. In addition to this, I used websites such as SlideShare and MediaKnowAll in order to research the various theories and ideas which I would need to use in my work, such as the reception theory and Andrew Goodwin's theory about the seven features which all music videos contain. When researching the history of music video, I primarily used Wikipedia, as this contained a large amount of encyclopaedic information about which videos were the most popular over time, and about the transition from MTV to YouTube as the primary website on which music videos are viewed. In addition to this, I was able to use YouTube to watch music videos over time so I could see how various traits have changed within them. Overall, using various websites within the research and planning stage of the production of my music video helped me to formulate ideas about what to include in our own music video when we made it.

During the research and planning stage, we were required to make a lip-syncing video, in order to gain some vital practise using the filming and editing equipment. We used new media technology in the editing stage of this video, using iMovie in order to piece the shots together. This is when we discovered that it is difficult to piece footage together in order to produce a convincing lip-sync, leading us to practise with the technology a lot more. This was a useful task as it showed us the pros and cons of using iMovie, and led us to make the decision to split the editing between iMovie and Final Cut for the final film. In terms of my ancillary products, I used Adobe imaging software such as Photoshop and Fireworks in order to experiment with different ways to manipulate both images and text, as these skills would be essential in order to design an effective magazine advert and digipak. I had no By using new media technology to experiment with designing, I was able to come up with some initial ideas of how I wanted the ancillary products to look, which meant that this part of the research also helped greatly with my planning for the construction of the products. New media technology was incredibly important in both researching and planning all of my products as it allowed me to find out a heap of new information, and to practise and perfect the skills which I began to develop during the construction of my foundation portfolio last year.

Construction 

During the construction stage of both our music video and ancillary products, I used a great amount of both new technologies, and technologies which I already had some experience with. For the music video, the most important piece of technology which we used was the camera, a Canon HD CMOS Pro. The camera had an excellent assisted focus control, which made it easy to create a strong depth of field within certain shots of our video. This is because it automatically zoomed in to allow the shot to be perfectly focused, then was able to be zoomed out in order to film the shot. As a lot of our video was filmed in the dark, it was important to be able to capture a crisp shot which picked our subject out from the darkness - our camera was excellent at this. However, the camera also had some weaknesses which slightly hindered the production of our video, as the battery life was fairly weak with a maximum capacity of around 80 minutes. This meant that we had to vastly limit the length of time which we could shoot for in a single evening, although the limited battery life did help in the respect that it forced us to be more concise when choosing what material to shoot. In addition to this, the camera filmed onto a built in flash drive rather than SD card, meaning that we had  to wait until we got back to school to upload the footage and begin editing - an SD card would have meant we could have begun editing at home immediately. It also would have been desirable if the camera had its own built in light, as it would have made illuminating the tracking shots much easier.

Along with the camera, we had to incorporate a tripod and a dolly into the production process of our video, as these meant that we could film stable shots, greatly adding to the professionalism of our video. The tripod was used for all of the lip syncing shots within the music video, as a moving camera would have made these shots disorientating for the viewer. We used the dolly sparsely during the music video, as shots which featured too much movement suffered from a slight motion blur on the camera, although a few short tracking shots where we used the dolly are visible within the video.



This screenshot shows the new version of iMovie, which
borrows many of the features and layout from Final Cut X

Another important piece of hardware used for the construction stage of our music video was the iMac which we used as a workstation for our editing. This computer was chosen because it has 8gb of flash memory RAM, a huge 1tb hard drive and a larger screen than most computers have (27 inches). This made it perfect for running both iMovie and Final Cut Express, which were the two software packages we used during the production of our video. I chose to use two different software technologies to edit, as iMovie has a more simplistic layout which made piecing the video together a lot easier, whilst Final Cut was used for recolouring footage and performing more complex editing techniques such as embedding. We chose not to use Final Cut for all of the editing as I only know how to use Final Cut X to the degree which would be required to edit a music video, whereas Final Cut Express is more complex and thus would have hindered rather than helped the production process of the video. Specific features which we used from the software include iMovie's precision editor in order to assist with our lip syncing, and Final Cut's colour editing which allowed us to separate the mid-tones, shadows and brightness of each clip in order to make our character and setting appear to be as naturalistic as possible. It was important that we used a Mac to edit our footage on, as using a Windows PC would severely hinder the quality of editing software which we had available to us. 



We used YouTube heavily during the construction aspect of the music video, as it allowed us to upload parts of our video which we could send to members of our target audience to immediately gain feedback. This was incredibly useful as it meant we could make changes on the fly, as without having a facility such as YouTube then we would have had to send our rough cuts to our audience on DVD and wait for them to respond - a much more costly and timely process.

In addition to the construction of the music video, I also used a variety of hardware and software in the construction of my digipak and magazine advert. We used a Canon 600D in order to take the pictures for our products. This worked well as it has an 18 megapixel sensor, allowing us to take professional quality pictures. In addition to this, it had interchangeable lenses, meaning that we could use a macro lens to take close up pictures of our character, and then switch to a wide angled lens to take an establishing shot of the woods as a setting within our video. We edited the images using Adobe Photoshop, an industry standard photo editing suite. It was excellent to have access to this software as it allowed us to produce our products with a surprising amount of ease, although I do believe that we should have spent even more time learning how to use the software during the research and planning stage in order to yield the best result possible for our products. This means that we made full use of photographic hardware and software during the construction stage of our product, although we should have considered spending more time on Photoshop in order to create a more professional product, and to ensure that our ancillary products had more coherence with our music video.

Overall, I believe that we used new media technologies relatively well during the construction process of our music video, although our one shortcoming was that we didn't experiment enough with the equipment, which could have allowed us to produce an even more imaginative and memorable music video.

Evaluation

When putting together my evaluation, I used a variety of multimedia technologies to present my conclusion in an exciting and invigorating way. Similar to the research and planning stage, I used Blogger in order to present my findings using multimedia, for example in this post, where I have been able to seamlessly integrate text and images to back up my points. Using Blogger also means that I have been able to edit my evaluation as many times as necessary, whereas if I had been evaluating the task on paper, I would have had to continually redraft until I had a document which I was happy with the standard of. Another media technology which I used within my evaluation is Prezi, an online presentation creation software. It allowed me to answer question three in a much more imaginative way, as I could place the feedback we had received alongside my videos, meaning that anybody who wished to view it could view them side by side rather than having to keep flicking between the two. In addition to this, many find Prezi to be a more engaging way of displaying information than just pure text, as like Blogger it has capabilities for the user to embed a wide range of multimedia.

In addition to this, I used Final Cut X in order to construct and edit the video which I used to answer  question one. This involved a variety of media skills which I had learned from the production of our video, as I had to import our video and lay a directors commentary over the top, speaking about how our product had been influenced by other music videos and media, such as film and television. When recording the audio for this part of the project, I used Logic as it made it a lot easier to cut different strands of speech together and make them sound fluid as if they had been said in one flow. In addition to this, I had to embed clips from the other music videos into this evaluation product, which helped to make my evaluation much more effective as it showed the viewer exactly which part of each music video ours has taken influence from.

To conclude, I believe that I used new media technologies to their full extent during the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages of producing my product.

Evaluation Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination of the main product (your music videos) and ancillary tasks?

Script: Overall, there is an evident link between the music video and the ancillary products which we have designed as part of our advanced portfolio coursework. The photographs which makes up the basis of the digipack and magazine advert are not scenes from our video, as we photographed the subjects and the background separately in order to give us as many opportunities to change things up during the editing stage. 

In terms of the music video and the magazine advert, there is a clear coherence in the way that Connar, as the protagonist, is featured rather than Tom, who is playing the role of the antagonist. By not including an image of Tom, we are hoping that this will make it clearer that Connar is the main character and that Tom is not, and that Connar will be the more recognisable one within the video. In addition to this, the products both have the subject and background lit by an extremely bright light. By including this feature of our music video within our magazine advert we are able to continue the themes of fear and regret, as the high key lighting means that there are evident shadows on the characters. A third point of similtarity between the two products is the focus on the title of the song - the video features the character lip syncing the word "past", which makes the use of the title of the song on the poster more effective. However, we could have created even more coherence between these two products by featuring the two characters in a position which they are actually seen in the video, for example the last shot where Tom is seen with his hands around Connar's neck.

When considering the music video and digipack, there are a few noticable similarities which allow the potential audience to make the link. For starters, the product features an image of both of the characters from the video, making there a double chance that they will recognise at least one of the characters in one of the products. For example, the background image which runs throughout the digipack is made up of the woods seen within the music video, which we hope will be recognisable. However, there is a limitation to the effectiveness of this, as there is nothing distinctive about the woods which mean that they will be immediately recognisable to the audience. We could have made this more effective by placing something distinctive within both products, for example the name of the song scratched into one of the trees. In addition to this, there is a link between the two products in the respect that there is a variety of locations within the woods used as we shot the pictures in many different woods in order to ensure that there are distinct locations used within the video.

Most of our draft ideas for the digipack featured just the one protagonist, which we had to change fairly late on for the final product, as the feedback for our second rough cut suggested that we should feature two different characters in order to make our narrative stronger.

The combination of the digipack and the magazine advert is the most effective and easiest to spot. This is because they are both based around the same image which we have created, whereas this is not immediately recognisable from the video as it is not taken directly from it. In addition to this, they both use the same font and colouring, which is fairly distinctive in itself. We could have created coherence across all three products by including some text within the video, such as having the lyrics appearing on screen. Both of the products also contain very similar text, such as the website for the artist and record label. This information is important as a marketing tool, as both of the products are designed to catch the eye of a potential fan, with the small-print on the products being the next port of call in order to find out more about the artist. 

Overall, I believe that there generally a high level of coherence within the combination of our three products, as it is clear that the three products have been designed as part of a single marketing campaign. 

Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Accompanying Notes: I believe that we use, develop and challenge forms and conventions in many ways throughout our music video. These nods are evident in both the theoretical and stylistic elements of our video. An example of where we have used a convention of real media products is through the primary setting of the video - the woods. Two existing media products which use this setting are Dog Days Are Over by Florence & The Machine, and Gust of Wind by Pharrell. However, we also developed this setting, as both of these videos have been filmed in the daytime, with our use of a nighttime setting giving our video an eerie feel. Our music video has used the dark and confusing themes which are seen within many of SBTRKT’s other music videos, such as NEW DORP. NEW YORK and Hold On. We chose to extend this convention of his work to encompass our video as the themes of his videos perfectly evoke the emotions within his songs, meaning that our video would not have been as effective had we taken a difference stance to it. Another convention which we have used within our music video is the mixture of colour and black & white shots, which was influenced by films such as Kill Bill, with the black and white added in order to give it a further sense of mystery. 

In addition to this, our music video takes a lot of influence from Donnie Darko, as the majority of the shots are incredibly dark with only the subject being illuminated. This was difficult to achieve, as we had to keep adjusting the ISO on the camera to ensure that it only let in enough light for the subject to be visible. 

In terms of challenging forms and conventions, our video challenges the often seen convention of teenagers being seen as partying and having little to care about, as seen in videos such as We Can't Stop by Miley Cyrus. On the contrary, the close up shots used within our video show that our character is clearly deeply troubled about something, meaning that our video challenges the stereotypical representation of a teenager within music videos. In addition to this, our video also challenges genre conventions of existing media products. In other deep house/electro videos, one of the largest conventions is to include the artist performing as a DJ - for example F For You by Disclosure. However, our video doesn't include anything like this, as we believe that it would distract from the narrative and would make the story seem less realistic to the viewer.   

Trials of the Past: Final Cut

This is our final cut of our music video. We have added in various different things based on personal opinions and also based on feedback received from our target audience.

The first noticeable difference between our final version and the initial two cuts, is that the use of black and white is more purposeful, we changed this based on audience feedback. Prior to this, the effects had been used very sporadically and that meant that the audience did not really understand why it was being used. The main reason for the black and white is to distinguish between reality and dreams. The black and white connote this to the audience and as a result the audience can understand what is happening.

Also in this version we have a lot more location shots, again this was based on audience feedback from the first two versions that we had done. The audience wanted to see more of the location, this was beneficial to us and the audience because it meant by doing this we could build on strengthening the narrative to make it obvious what was happening throughout, all the way until the end of the music video. The location shots also meant that we could show off our camera skills, we have used a range of shots, long shots, close ups and even establishing shots of the moon with the trees in the way.

Another difference is that we have added another character. This was quite a large change that we considered late on. The reason for adding the second character is that we had to add more depth to our narrative rather than just having one character who may be lost and can't find his way home. Adding a second character really aided our narrative and made our whole video more interesting and captivating to watch. We did away with the fatal ending which we thought was too severe and not shot properly and incorporated the idea of a recurring dream instead. We are pleased with our final cut and like the way it has come out.

Final Magazine Advert

 

I believe that our final magazine advert is largely effective because it takes many conventions from the other two products which it is paired with.

Final Digipack

This is our completed digipack. It was designed by taking inspirations from all of the different draft digipacks which were designed as a group, for example the setting of the woods was taken from mine and Calum's ideas, and the font and artist logo was taken from Rhys' ideas. I believe that the digipack is incredibly effective and will work as a good promotional tool for our video.