Evaluation Question 4

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

 

Research

The research section of the coursework was in my opinion that bit I found one of the easiest but as time went on it got a lot more difficult and complex as the ideas we had were at some point going to be put into action and if they were not good enough then we just had to deal with it.  YouTube and Google were prominent when it came to the research section of our coursework as when we were researching similar artists and other information about our own chosen artist etc. the web was the best place as I could find out information about our chosen artist and gather an in depth knowledge of what is expected of our artist. YouTube was another one we used which enabled us to watch videos from our chosen artist and see what different generic conventions are used and then we could take this away with us to use in our music video. It wasn’t about making a music video that is completely original as this would end up with a bad result, the key to success for this task was to take ideas from previous years student videos and ideas from famous videos. Reinventing the wheel wasn’t something that appealed to me as I am not very imaginative. The technologies I listed below played a vital role in me completing each piece of work and the reason they helped me was because Google enabled me to research into sections of the ‘research and planning’ that I couldn’t do using other resources and from this it enabled me to gain information efficiently and effectively. Moreover, YouTube also played a big part in me gaining information on music videos. I was able to research into different videos that I wanted to take inspiration from. Also, researching into music videos within my genre (alternative rock) was essential in me ensuring that I use codes and conventions that match my genre.  

Planning

Photoshop is an editing software that can be used by anyone across the world who can access a PC. The software can be used for many things such as producing flyers for businesses, simply to play around a create stuff and then producing adverts etc. like I used it for.  Photoshop was important and a key aspect when it came to the planning of the task as when we were creating our digipak and magazine advert this was the best document because it provides a number of different tools you can use to make the perfect advert and digipak. We also used Paint which is a creative programme and I used this whenever I had a rough idea and we just wanted to see what it would look like. Due to the fact paint isn’t very advanced it meant that I could take a quick 5 minute break to rough out an idea and see what it looks like. These programmes were significant as they allowed us to create stuff we would have never thought we would be able to make as the technology is very good meaning you can create a professional looking product if you spend your time wisely.

 

Construction

Construction was the most important section within this coursework as if you did not film the footage properly then this would have a negative result on how the final piece would look. My group unfortunately made this mistake and had to film again because our first set of raw footage was just not up to industry standard and made the decision to go and reshoot with a different actor as our first actor had to pull out last minute causing problems for us to try and find a new actor in such a short amount of time. Furthermore, we used a HD camera to shoot all the footage for our video, however we were only to use other cameras such as our own iPhone cameras as the quality is just the same but we didn’t as we could not mount our phone to anything to keep it still. The HD camera was provided to us by our school's Media Studies department with a tripod and dolly in case we need it. Once the filming was complete we would upload the footage to one of the Mac’s that are also provided by our school of which would then be ready for editing and lip syncing. Fortunately for our school we are provided with the best equipment in order to produce a quality student music video.

The second piece of media technology we used was IMovie and this was in my opinion the best software to use for editing as we used it for our AS coursework therefore I was familiar with the software and how to use it due to past experience. However, we were given the option to use final cut express which our group instantly said no as we were not ready to use a completely different software even though it is regarded as equally as good as IMovie. Once the clips were uploaded we started by taking sections from the raw footage and once we had all the best footage we would put this all together and creating a video.

Evaluation

Lastly, for the evaluation section we used Blogger which was the only thing I used for this. We had two blogger accounts which was a group blog and an individual blog which I posted daily to update people on everything I’m doing in order to create the video. The group blog was a lot less work as there were two of us which means the work was divided accordingly. Both of my accounts were made public for two reasons, one being so that people can view them whenever they want and the other being so that our teacher can view it so that she can make sure we are completing all the necessary work set.