Evaluation: Question Three

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

Throughout the construction of the video and accompanying ancillary work, I used a variety of different technologies to achieve the desired products.

In carrying out the research, we used several sites on the internet to gain inspiration for our video, based on the genre that we chose. The video site Youtube was a vital ingredient in searching for ideas as we looked at official music videos from artists we admired to see if it would give our group any ideas, we found a repeated motif and different shots that we wanted to use. We'd also visited  artists websites, to help us inspire the distinctive look we wanted our artist to have. It also helped me to create my digipak, as I admired the use of the overgrown/ rural backround, which is a theme we kept consistent through the music video and my ancillary work.

For some reason blogger has captioned the whole of my question three, so can you please click read more at the bottom of the blog to see my completed answer. Thank you.

This is the website of the artist Avril Lavigne, although she is more mainstream than the music from our artist 'Lilia' we wanted to create a similiar look, to help attract our audiences as they would appeal to the same audience.

These are screen grabs from youtube, showing the official video for the song 'Dont Go' by Wretch 32. This is a video uploaded by WRETCH32TV, therefore we know it is real not not a fake uploaded by a fan.  The angel wings we decided was going to be our motif, however our artist was going to wear them throughout the whole video, in order to give our artist a particular recognised image. The shot of the hands further inspired the reflective shots we included in our video, as we had our artist putting her hand towards the water than showing the reflection of her face afterwards.

We used blogger itself as a way to put down and broadcast our ideas, it also helped us to remain organised throughout the planning and production stages, as we would know what we had filmed and what else we needed to do. Blogger also acts as a place for other people to watch our videos and read our blogs in relation to our products, so we know what were doing right and not. It helped us to document what we did during the days of filming and show our teachers and the examiner how much fun we had. Earlier on blogger we had uploaded an animatic video, so we had referenced to this whilst editing our video to ensure we had put our shots in the right place to what we had originally planned.

After showing the completed music videos at the 'Screen on the Green', all of them are put on vimeo in the 283 Goswell group so everyone can see them again. Vimeo is a place where many amateur videomakers put on their work and allows for other people to comment/ like and view them.

Being luckily enough to know the actual artist for our chosen song, we were allowed to put the rough cut on facebook in order to receive feedback and to know what we needed to improve on. This helps as we get the views of people who arent just media students, and the artist herself.

The feedback was completely positive, and got 53 likes which I was proud of. Although the comments didnt help much to improve our product it was nice to be able to show it to see whether it appealed to our target audience. Although the song is not mainstream or known  people still liked the video, which further suggests that any type of music can be appealing  to a broader audience if there is a good representation and creative element to the music video.  

For filming our music video we used new professional cameras, this allowed us to film our footage in high definition and to zoom in and out, and to be ableto have different framing of shots, such as close ups and extreme close ups, both of which remained in good quality and did not appear blurry. The cameras are also able to go in and out of focus, therefore we were able to shoot a variety of interesting shots and have our artist moving in and out which suited the feeling of the song. As we did overnight filming and filming over a few days, we needed to bring extra batteries however this was quite troublesome and ran out very quickly, so we had to be selective with our footage and only film what was necessary and make sure it was good enough to use in the final video. To save our footage we used two memory cards, in which we uploaded all the contents to the video drive, to be able to edit it in final cut pro. 

Box lights were often used in the production stages. The artificial lighting was used frequently in addition to the natural lighting outside, so that we could perfect the brightness and contrast in order for the shots to look the same even if they were in different locations, therefore it would be easy to edit the different shots together and make them look similiar, rather than the footage looking disjointed and out of place. As the song itself was quite repititive, we thought that it would be more effective in the long run for the footage to be repititive also. Only downfall of these was that the lights dimmed very quickly and batteries constantly kept being replaced, so the lighting would not always remain as bright in all of the shots. The batteries were also incredibly heavy and tiresome to carry around whilst filming.




During the editing process, our group lived in the media editing suite. We used the programme final cut pro to perfect our footage and edit it together,whilst syncing it with our chosen track.

Final cut pro allowed us to be extremely creative with our footage, although we were very apprehensive beforehand whilst importing our clips. We had realised that we had nowhere near enough useable footage, but loads of random shots, so many of our shots had to be replicated. Final cut allowed us to choose from many different effects in order to enhance our footage. We used the tool 'bad film' to achieve the flickery effect, which seemed distorted, authentic and edgy to suit the feel of the song. The brightness and contrasting filters were initially used in order to make the artists shots look more flattering and appealing to the audience, we then replicated this throughout the video to make the other shots look the same. We frequently speeded up and slowed down shots to increase the emphasis on particular aspects of the footage, also by cropping them we were able to select the best parts to use in the video, and by using basetracks on different lines we were able to quickly cut in between footage, so that a particular shot didnt remain on the screen for too long.

Here there is a voiceover of me talking about aspects of our video in final cut pro and how we achieved our end product through our extensive use of effects.

I recorded this video with a programme called iShowU. However in being able to convert the video so it can be put on blogger I used a programme called MPEG Streamclip.

The programme Photoshop Elements was used in order to create my ancillary products, the 4 panel digipak and the advert. Photoshop enabled me to resize and position photos to scale and place them anywhere on the page. The option to convert the pictures to black and white was used in my ancillary work also, to remain consistant with the music video. With the colour picker tool, I was able to make sure that the blue colour I used remained consistent with the fonts and the blue saturation of some images. In being able to use the lasso tool, I managed to highlight the eyes, by selecting the inverse, I kept the blue colour of the eyes, however by adjusting the hue and saturation the blue was further enhanced in order to stand out.




In Photoshop there are a choice of simple fonts, to insert text. However the font I wanted was very different to any of the fonts that were available, so I used a programme called fontcase to chose my desired font. By activating the font, it was accessible in Photoshop, so I could use these instead.