How Did You Use new Media Technologies In The Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?
Research;
During the research stage, the predominant technology we used was the internet. This mainly included websites such as colonelblimp, as this was the main place i found the music videos I analysed, along with youtube. Also, the website Jamendo was where we found our artist, but to find a better song we had to visit the 'Brad Sucks' website. It was here we discovered that Brad Sucks was in fact a one-man-band, and thought we could portray this in our music video in some way. Also we saw the actual CD cover for the "I Don't Know What I'm Doing" album, and this helped us think up ideas in terms of colour and layout etc. Throughout the whole of this stage, we continually uploaded research onto Blogger.com, which made it our most visited website. We also used the Google image search to find the images of the posters and digipaks of our chosen artists to analyse.
Planning;
We used the Corel software, particularly the Corel Draw program throughout the whole production process, but in this stage was when we were most using it, as we were constantly re-doing drafts of our digipaks and posters to try to reach a more professional standard for our work, and obviously we had to use trial and error to see which effects would look best for the ancillary products. To get the ancillary drafts and final designs onto our blog, the format saved by Corel software wouldn't upload onto Blogger, so we had to open the files through the Paint software and then re-save them into JPEG formats so we were able to get them onto our blogs. This again shows the importance of using the internet to aid our production. For storyboarding, no real media technology was required, because the storyboards themself were enough for us to plan out our narrative and performance elements of the video. We could decide what was going to happen and when we wanted it to happen, and then scan the finalised storyboards through onto the blogs, again using the internet. Admittedly, to capture the background photos for our digipak (all tiles) required a bit of opportunistic filming. We took the digital camera out onto our college field to get some photos of the boxes at a higher angle so that you could see the shadows on the grass, but fortunately for us it turned out to be one of the sunniest days of the year so far, and luckily we were able to get a shot of a blue sky. We chose the lower angle to emphasise the blue and white which would not contrast with the boxes as much as the green colour of the grass, and offer synergy with the poster design we had done.
Construction;
The main technology we used in this stage was the Digital Video cameras to capture all our shots, including the use of the dolly and tripod when we needed to. For our sad face, we used the tripod and camera to create stationary shots to represent the expression with no camera movement at all. We then made use of the shaky, hand-held camera work to portray the emotion anger. We felt that if we were to use this technique here then our audience would possibly be able to notice, especially as we utilised both the dolly and tripod simultaneously for our happy shots, particularly the dancing sequence on the instrumental. The fluid movement by the camera in this part of the video we thought could represent the feel of the music, which was again reflected by the introduction of the full band playing the song after the instrumental. After our filming was completed, and even during filming when we felt we could do something, we made use of the Apple Imacs and the program imovie 09 to edit the project altogether. We took risks to achieve certain shots during the editing process, and the most difficult one we attempted was a split screen edit. As i mentioned earlier, Brad Sucks is a one man band, and in this type of shot we were trying to place the same person on the drums on one side of the screen and playing bass on the other. To achieve this, we had to revert to using the Final Cut Pro software. After we used the internet to see how to actually compose the shot, we had to save the file as a quicktime file then transfer it into imovie program, however the quality of the shot decreased somewhat, as it became blurry once we had opened it in imovie. We also reverted back to the Corel Draw software in this stage, as we created the final draft of our digipak and poster on there, following on from the drafts we had previously done. After completing the video, we uploaded it to youtube, which allowed us to gather feedback from a larger community rather than just simply uploading it onto blogger and potentially getting a lot less feedback.
Evaluation;
For the final stage, the main technology I used was the Apple Imac, particularly the built in iSight for the imovie 09 program. This was the easiest way to film the shorter questions for the evaluation. One advantage of this was that the film would be directly put into the program, rather than borrowing a Digital Video (DV) camera from the college then taking time to upload the footage into the program. I used the imovie software to edit the footage i got and also to insert 'divider' slides, namely the title transitions where the questions appeared. The internet has been used extensively throughout all 4 stages, and again it is important to use in this stage, as i could upload the video i got onto blogger, and also i could post the final question in a blog entry. Youtube is also possibly an option for the evaluation, but as feedback is not particularly required for the evaluation stage i thought that just putting all my evaluation on blogger was the most suitable course of action.
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