Evaluation part 4

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

Final Cut Pro

In order to edit footage for my music video; I used the program Final Cut pro, a professional level editing software that is made by Apple. I first started using it at the beginning of the project, when I was practicing lip syncing, this task was useful, as it also familiarised me with the software, as I previously had only used iMovie, which is entry level software. I also used final cut to put together the animatic for the music video.  Some of final cuts features were very useful when making the actual music video. These included, having multiple sound tracks, being able to lock particular sound tracks, cutting part of a clip before adding it to video, having the ability the zoom in to cut at a very specific point in time. Final cuts preset effects also proved useful, as in the music video, we used both a fade and one of the preset colour correct called “Threshold”.

Camera

The camera that we used for filming was an entry level camera that was primarily designed to take photographs. This presented some obstacles when filming the music video, as it did not mit many of the tripod in our media department and we had to look for aspecific piece to fit. The fact that it was entry level also meant that the picture quality was not that good, and when you tried to zoom in, the picture would become very pixelated. This restricted our video from using close up shots, otherwise the picture quality would be extremely bad.

Tripod

We used a tripod while filming in order to create a steady shot by placing the camera on it to prevent shaking from a person holding the camera. This wasn’t used as much as most texts use them, as we wanted quite a lot of our shots to be shaky in order to keep the audience on edge.  This was mainly used for shots of the landscape and the shots of the main character walking through the streets.

Blogger

For the research and written aspects of the project, I created a blog using blogger to post on. This website was very appropriate for the project, as it meant that I could keep a running profile of the project that was updated regularly rather than having one long document of the entire project. Blogger also has some features that were very convenient for the nature of the project. It allows you to upload pictures and embed videos into posts, this feature worked very well for the three tasks, as it meant that I could post drafts, real media examples, and the final products on the blog. Blogger also allows design layouts, so I could choose my own colour scheme, and organise my posts into categories. It also meant that I could provide links to Joseph Richardson’s and my media department’s blogs.  Another big advantage of using Blogger was that all my work was very portable and accessible. The fact that it is stored on the internet meant that I could work on my blog almost anywhere without having to carry around a storage device. This proved very useful for the research, planning and evaluation stages.

Youtube

Youtube came into good use during the research and evaluation stages of the project. It is a video-sharing website owned by Google. For the research stage, it allowed me to look up existing music videos in order to look at conventions and apply them to the theories which I looked at. It allowed me to upload my animatic and finished music video, which I could then put onto my blog. Youtube also provided a potential for audience feedback for the evaluation stage. Uploading my music video onto Youtube meant that anyone could view the video and then comment what they thought about it.

Photoshop

Photoshop is an image editing software developed by Adobe that is used during the construction stages of the digipack and print advert. It contains all the features that were required to create the two ancillary texts. These included being able to put text over images, altering size, shape and colour, magic wand tool and the magnetic lasso tool.