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
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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.
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| 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.
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