Evaluation: Question 3

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

To answer this question I'm going to break down the stages for making our video and talk about all the equipment and applications used throughout each stage of planning and construction.

Research 

Before I could begin creating the music video I had to research on what the conventions of a music video are in general and within our genre. For this I had used blogger to record all of our research that I had found and found multiple music videos on Youtube to support our findings and points. 

Here you can a post I had made on Mulvey's theory about the male gaze. 

After looking at the different styles a music video can be approached by, we as a class were given a different task which was lip syncing and creating a very short music video.

Lip syncing task

This was our first time filming this year so it didn't go as smoothly as I hoped, however once we got the footage it was pretty easy, we used Final Cut Pro to input the footage and edit the footage so it would be lip synced with the actual song.
  
Here is our lip sync practical footage.

I wish we had a little more time to get more footage but from what we had it was clear that we could actually use this skill.

 

Research about our music video

After we had finished our lip sync practical and was comfortable with editing other footage to music I then started thinking of our own music video, as a group we had to research and blog about everything we planned to involve within our music video, this included things such as location, concept, costume, synergy, our target audience, social media that we would plan use, draft digipaks, storyboards, a production schedule that we will plan to stick to and more. Whilst making all this research we would use applications such as prezi, emaze, slideshare and powtoon so it was a lot clearer to present our information.

Here is an example of an emaze I had created discussing our target audience.

Here's our production schedule that I created using time toast


Once we had finished research and had a good idea on what are music video will be like we headed onto filming.

 

Filming

Since we was allowed to film during our half-term break our group was lucky enough (and fast enough) to get the college's only DSLR camera, the DSLR is known for being a digital single lens reflex camera. It is a digital camera that has combined the optics and mechanisms of a single lens reflex camera with a digital imaging sensor as opposed to the normal photographic film. Its this key feature what makes this camera actually able to film in such higher quality compared to other digital cameras.

Our group was fortunate enough to have someone highly experienced with using a DSLR, but as we got it for the first time before filming any actual footage we wanted to make sure that the film would work just as well as footage from the other video cameras with Final Cut Pro, In addition to this we had plans to film some of our music video at night so one group member had gone into a dark classroom to see if the light was strong enough and if the footage files would be good for Final Cut Pro.

This was our test video for the DSLR

It turned out that the files worked perfectly with Final Cut Pro and so we would not have any issues while editing. The camera could also hold two memory cards for film footage and we would always have a third that would be used only for pictures. 

Whilst filming we were at Alexandra Palace, to stay connected with the college we had an instagram and twitter set up for our artist and we would post on both whenever we was out filming.
This was taken from our Instagram.

After just over a week of filming we finally had all of our footage to begin editing.

Editing

We began editing as soon as we were back from half term, in which we had done all of our filming. To edit our music video we was using Final Cut Pro which was very easily to use since all of us had become experienced in using it from last year. As well as being able to cut our clips so we had no unwanted footage on our final piece we also added a lot of effects in our music video.
This started at the opening of our music video, we added a 360 twist blur which was in slow motion and had cross dissolved  from our artist sleeping to being dressed up in our created wonderland, this effect wasn't that hard for me to create as I've previously done something similar but along with assistance from the technician this did not take as long as I thought it would initially. Another effect added was making a certain part of the music video go in black and white, this was a lot easier to do compared to the previous effect as it was just adding in a filter on certain clips. Whilst editing we also had to blog about what changes we were making and what we was creating, we had used a program called handbrake so it was possible to put rough cuts onto the blog and use the footage for blogging at home.

Ancillary research
As we had finished editing and created our music video we then as a class proceeded onto our ancillary work and designing a digipak and poster for our artist. Before we went straight into using photoshop and creating our products we had to do research on similar digipaks and advertisements within our genre and most importantly find conventions for digipaks and advertisements, again to help present this a lot more clearer in the blog I had used Prezi as it allowed me to designate one slide to one artist's digipak and advertisement and compare them to my initial ideas.
Here is a Prezi I created talking about the conventions of artist's digipaks within our genre.


Creating ancillary products
After I had finished researching upon the conventions of digipaks and advertisements I then had to create mine, to do this I used Adobe Photoshop which was an application I was greatly experienced in already due to having to do previous independent work on it before. That being said I only finished my digipak and advertisement on deadline day because I kept making constant changes to make sure it was perfect for my likings. 
You can see my deadline changes and finished digipak here and advertisement here. 

Here's the overall process of making the outside cover in which I used Photoshop to make and slideshare to produce the slideshow:



and here's the overall process of making the inside cover in Photoshop:



After creating the ancillary work I then recorded feedback from classmates using audacity which I then created a video at home using Sony Vegas Pro10 as I don't have access to Final Cut Pro, since I'm experienced with Vegas Pro10 and the video was only consisting of images and a voice over the video was not hard to create.

Here is the video of the feedback

After we had finished our ancillary work all that was left was the evaluation questions

Evaluation
For our evaluation questions will be expected to produce them on our blogs, I'll use slideshow applications such as Prezi, emaze and slideshare for the questions that I think best suit it, this question would not be suitable for an application program as it required a lot of embedded previous work as evidence.