evaluation question 4

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

Introduction

Throughput our whole process from planning to making and evaluating we have used media technologies throughout in pretty much every single task. Some of the media products I was using I already knew a fair bit about however through this process I have learnt a lot more about different ways I could incorporate media technologies into my coursework. The media technologies we have incorporated have also been a huge part in helping us organize everyone to get together.

IMac

One of my most used devices was an IMac that the schools already had, I had the choice of a mac or a normal windows computer I chose the mac because I have one at home and therefore would find it easier, as I find I am more adapted to the macs. The IMac was responsible for all of the editing process and the majority of my blogs that I uploaded were through this. A lot of my research was also done using the mac, this was helpful as it is Internet enabled so I was able to search for pretty much everything I needed and as a result if this lots of my research came from the mac. The IMac was used in nearly all stages that I needed, I used it for pre production to do a lot of research, as the research was what japed me decide what we were going to do for our video. We did a lot of analyzing of other videos to look at their styles in camera work, mise en scene and clothing. Then for production we used the iMac for all of our editing of the music video, this was a long process but relied heavily on the iMac for a lot of the editing. Another piece of production that we used the macs for were when creating the ancillary texts I again used the mac for analyzing others to make one of my own that I like and was happy with. Finally I have used the iMac for postproduction, as I have had to do all of my evaluations using tools through the mac.

IPhone

Another apple product that i used was the iPhone 7; this is my personal mobile phone. This came in very handy for when I was trying to organize everyone to get together for production. I used apps like Snapchat and Facebook messenger to create group chats, which were handy to see whether people were free on certain dates; this was a lot easier than having to message everyone individually as everyone could see when others were either free or busy. In Facebook Messenger it also allowed us to set reminders so this meant if everyone had notifications turned on for the application that everyone would get a reminder depending non when it was set for, we had the reminder set the night before filming so everyone would be reminded. Again in production it was useful as we could use ‘maps’ which is the equivalent to a sat nav just on your iPhone, this was very handy when we were trying to find places that wed never been to before or didn’t know the directions our filming destination. Another helpful thing with the iPhone was that I could play music through it so we hooked it up t o a speaker so that our performers knew what to sing.

Blogger

The site where pretty much all my work that can be published has been published, the site I used fir this is blogger. The reason I had chosen blogger over other sites was because I had already had experience from working with blogger, this then meant it was now kinked in with my Google account so I only ever had to log in with Google and didn’t have to log in again and again. It was handy as well as if I had any unfinished work that was going to end up on my blog then I could just save it on the blog and once I signed into any other computer and went on to blogger it would be there. This was a big link from being able to do work from school and home.

IMovie/ Final Cut Pro

When we came to editing we initially started off with using final cut pro, this is editing software that the school supported on its computers. However we found it hard because the schools macs aren’t linked up to the other school computers we couldn’t go back to the work that we had been doing during lessons on the macs. Originally we had decided that we would each separately edit the video however when we realized that we were running out of time and no out f lesson time was available for us to use the macs as other classes were using it we came to the decision that we would all work off of Alex’s MacBook air. As Alex did not have final cut pro we then changed programs to iMovie, it also worked in a very similar way however with a few adjustments. The advantage of working off of Alex’s MacBook meant that we could do it anywhere and anytime we wanted as it is easily portable and he brings it to school everyday. It was handy as well because it meant we could go into quitter places meaning we can listen to the song, which was vital for getting the lip-syncing done. IMovie has been used for our postproduction section of our product, because this is how we turned our raw footage into an actual product.

YouTube

In order for us to make a vide that would suit within our genre we had to do a lot of research especially of other music videos. YouTube was a vital part of our pre production process, form YouTube we found the song that our music video was going to be based around ‘sticks ‘n’ stones’. So once the song had been found it was important to do some research of other videos within our genre. We looked at lots of videos and ones that we used for inspiration of our final video consisted of: Rat Boy Sign On, King Krule Easy Easy and the origami video Jamie T sticks ‘n’ stones. It was a valuable source for us to get a lot of research done. I also analyzed videos using YouTube, it was important to take in al of the features including editing, mise en scene, lighting and sound. Once all of our post production stage had been done we then had to upload it somehow and make sure it was accessible form our blog, we decided that we would upload via YouTube and because all three of us have the same video we had it uploaded to Alex YouTube as it was in his MacBook which we could then get a copy of it each onto our own blogs. This was a vital piece of our post production process as it meant that anyone could now view our recreated sticks ‘n’ stones music video.

ITunes

Once we had chosen our song it was important that we had a legal copy of the song so that we could do the editing of our music video over the sound of the song. The way that I chose to get the song was by purchasing copy of it from the apple iTunes. The reason I chose to purchase it form here is because I was originally working on the IMac it made it simpler just using the official apple application. The advantage of using purchasing it form iTunes as well is that the song will have been bought for all of the devices where I sign into with my account, this meant that my phone also now had a copy of the song, when we came to production this as helpful as it meant I could play the song in the background so our performers knew what to sing which then kept them in time, this would then make the job of post production a lot easier as well because when we came t editing we could also listen to the background noise and hear the part of the song that we were trying to lip sync up.

Photo-shop

One of the tasks we were set was to make ancillary texts; these included making a digipak and an advert for the digipak release date. A digipak is the packaging for a cd to be housed in so we had to create one of these for our band, which would include our song. I decided to make an LP instead of an EP because I thought it made the digipak look better and more interesting. Photoshop was very helpful when coming to the editing of photos for my album cover and the album advert. I was given a link to the template for the digipak from the teacher’s blog then once I got to the page I had to download the right template for what I needed, the template made it a lot easier for me to work Photoshop and will have saved a lot of time. Photoshop also helped me with pre productions I used this software to make some mood boards, which would have an effect on how our final product would turn out. It was also used in the postproduction because once I had my entire digipak and advert were made using Photoshop.

Myfonts.com

After research we had it was time to find our own font that would be used whenever the band is used which in turn would be the logo. The site that we used for finding fonts was called myfonts.com it gave us options of what type of details we would like the font to look like, the other option it gave us was that we could enter our band name so we could actually see what it would look like on the name. after a lot of research we had a page with over 20+ fonts on and we then started to narrow it down we all agreed that the font we would use was ‘grateful black’ I liked how some of the letters were filled in but not all of them, I personally thought it gave it a cool and playful look. My fonts were very helpful pre production because it made it easier for us to find a font and to do more research to fid the right font. It was also helpful in postproduction because when putting our band name on everything it was important that we stuck with the same font so it was easily recognizable.

Nikon D7000- Nikkor 55200 lens

The main bit of our production process from media technologies was the camera, for us we used a Nikon D7000 supported with a Nikkor 55200 lens. The lens enabled us to change our focus in and out with ease and made it look professional as it wasn’t to slow or too fast. I played around with the focus as I liked the effect it gave the video in the end we didn’t really use the out of focus scenes too much but there still were parts where we used them shots. The lens also allowed us to zoom in and out readily and again gave it a professional look because especially when filming it made the zoom a lot smoother by not doing it too quick or slow. It was quite difficult to get use to the lens as when zooming you had to make sure that you would keep up with the focus as well, however once I had figured this out we got some good shots. the filming quality was high quality with a 4k camera quality. This was good because it made the results look very professional as the camera was of such good quality, instead of it looking average, it also made it easier in the postproduction stages as we hardly had to edit any of the actual shots for lighting or anything.

LinkedIn

When coming to the pitch that me and my group created we originally started on PowerPoint but we then moved across to linked in. the reason we did this is because it meant that our work was accessible form the internet is that all three of us could edit it from where ever we wanted as long as we were connected to the internet. When we came to the pitch it was helpful as there was one computer that we had to do the pitch from so logging into linked in was all we had to do and then click on the presentation we wanted. This was helpful during our research part as rom this presentation we received feedback and the feedback had an impact on what the audience thought of the idea whether they liked it or would change some things, fortunately we mainly received positives feedback with few negatives.

Twitter

Our teachers advised for us to create a social media page for our artists/ bands, I decided to make a twitter account for our band. The reason I chose twitter is because most bands have a twitter and it meant that we could encrypt our twitter feed on to the blog, to show the twitter feed. The twitter feed made our band look a lot more realistic as well because a lot of young and modern band  \(like ours) all have shared social media accounts, so it was important for us to stick in with the conventions of the genre.

Microsoft word

Microsoft word has been a very handy piece of software because even though all of my work ends up on to blogger, I have written everything into to word as it has handy tools. Word offers a better spell check and will even help if the sentence doesn’t make sense, another advantage is that it helps with capitals or underlines a word that would need a capital. These are all handy little services that Blogger doesn’t offer and if it odes its no the best so I write everything on to word first and then will copy it over to blogger or another place.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have used a lot of media technologies to help me throughout the process of making my final product.  I have learnt a lot through the process of making my products and the media technologies have aided me in ways that I couldn’t have done with out for this task. Throughout the whole process from the construction and research to all of production and evaluation stages I have been using media interfaces to help me get what I want to achieve. These media technologies have taught me a lot more about how I can use them and I have found a lot of new things out. So it has been very helpful having all of these media interfaces at my fingertips to make my final product.