Question 4

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

For our media video we had to choose a piece of music, that was not copyright, this was hard because we wanted to do a promo on a piece of music that had a video with it so we could use some key ideas. We used the website unsigned.com to find our track, we wanted to focus on the indie pop genre and wasn’t really interested in anything other than the indie genre as it didn’t suit our singer or our style as a group. We managed after a long time to find a track that we all agreed was what we wanted to do, they are fairly local and so we could use them and it would work with our looks and figure. We used the website unsigned because it was free and the artist are unsigned so here isn’t a copyright issue, this was the great thing about the website and the track as it fitted all of our criteria. We thought that if we made a DigiPak, Magazine advert and a Promo and we send it to them it can only benefit them and help them.

Face book helped us as you band has a Facebook page so we could gather information from this to help us with trying to make an image for them.  With the Facebook page we will send the band the video and see what they think to it. We found that face book was a quick way to get information.

 

YouTube – we used YouTube to find out what the band had done and whether they had out other songs on YouTube and also to see if they have a music video to any of their work. We could also use YouTube to look at promos from professionals that had made videos that were in the charts at the time. We also uploaded our promo to YouTube to gain feedback and to see how many views we will receive.

Final Cut pro- we used this to put our promo together and add effects, we found this was a good program to use as it had all of the features that we needed to make a convincing piece. We used lots of features on this program to do with the lighting and the depth of colours and the contrasts that were used for different scene, we also used some effects like the camera shot where it says memory 2 this was a feature that was available on Final Cut Pro.

Photoshop- we used this for our DigiPak and also for our magazine front cover this was a good program to use as it has lots of features that can be applied to pictures and text that looks professional and not like a teenager has made it. I enjoyed working with Photoshop as I learnt what I needed to do and learnt what different buttons did, I am now more confident in the use of it, whereas at first I was were unsure on how to use it and felt incapable to use it.

Email – we used email to contact the band to see if it would be alright to use their song and to see if they had any advice of what we could do it on and their interpretations of the lyrics as they had written them

From this I have learnt a lot from my AS level, we only used final cut pro on the end scene which didn’t take a lot of doing but we wanted to gain experience and learn how to use Final Cut Pro and so we did the whole promo on there. We learnt a lot along the way, Kingston knew a fair bit already and he told us what he knew but the rest we figured out how to do it by reading up on it and looking guides that helped us to succeed in what we wanted to do. Using Photoshop was also a challenge as I spent a lot of time using that and working on our magazine advert and on our DigiPak, I didn’t know a great deal and had never used it before and so I read up on how to perform simple task and then asked other who were more knowledgeable on the subject, from this my knowledge grew.

From the filming side I learnt a lot more about shot composition and where the best shots were taken from and what was required to get the best results. When we were filming we decided we wanted a high shot and so we got a forklift and raise the camera on a top board and pallets and a member of our team and raised them up a few metres to get a higher shot, we also made pan shots with a pallet truck, a top board and pallets with the camera on a tripod. I feel that the next production we did together we could make it look really good as we know what to do and we can only go forward and we now also know the importance of planning before we go out to shoot as we had some problems with this as well but we overcame it and had a brief meeting to discuss what we were going to do on the morning of the shooting in the warehouse canteen.

Some of the problems we had while filming was the lighting in the warehouse and the fact that production had stopped and so the workers were around stock taking and did appear in certain shots but we re-did the shots and got them right. We also had problems with the items in the background e.g. the white board, loose boxes, the box machines and other bit that just appeared in the shots this was not ideal but we had to be grateful as we only had the warehouse for 5-6 hours. We also had a slight problem with lip sinking but we overcame this by spending some time on this and zooming in of the clip and taking clips out and adding clips in to make it look professional.

We used Blogger to add all of our notes onto of what we have been doing and also to show research that we have done, we used blogger as you can upload video and images onto it and it is free and so we could keep a video journal of what we have been up to. Blogger is a good way of keeping a journal as it is easy to use and all of the world can see unless you have privacy setting on and friends, family and other can see it without a password and can see what you have been up to.

We used the internet and search engines to look up the artist and see what we could find on them, if you are going to find anything on them anywhere then it will be on the internet as it is the highest use of information that is around, due to the high number of people using the internet we thought we could find what we needed on there without using the traditional methods like book because we doubted that we could find anything in there.

By putting what we had done on the internet it has opened it up to the world and millions of people can view it and it can only make the band more popular, we thought the internet was good because our teacher can view it without having to chase us for paperwork and the change of it getting lost on the internet are slim whereas the chance of paper items getting lost are high. By putting it on the internet we would be reaching out to our target market that would be looking for this sort of material. We thought if I was in a book or two it wouldn’t appreciated as much and would hardly be looked at as book are dated with today’s technology and the vast audience that would prefer to use the internet instead of a book because of the ease of use and the speed in which the internet does this. The internet is the best way to publish the band by the sheer amount of traffic that it is used by and this is why we chose it.