Evaluation Question 3

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

Camera :

We used brand new state of the art cameras to film our videos. These cameras were able to hold two memory cards, which gave the camera a lot of space to store our footage. The camera was fairly easy to use and the things we needed to know about it were very basic such as changing the focus: manual focus allowed us to focus the camera to our own standards and auto focus would focus the camera automatically for us.

Additionally the footage on our memory cards were able to fit in a memory card reader that allowed our footage to be transferred to our Imacs, which we could easily then store on our hard drives, storing our footage on our hard drive was very crucial because footage on a memory card could easily be erased, not to mention misplacing the memory cards is very common and easily done.

This is an image of me inserting the memory cards in the camera, and focusing the camera: 

Blogger:

Blogger is a media technology we used at all times, it was used for our research, planning and evaluation, without blogger each stage of our research, planning and evaluation would have been made a lot harder. blogger is so important because it was used to store all our research such as YouTube videos, class activities, for example blogs about Carol Vernallis and Andrew Goodwin and what kind of videos illustrate their ideas. We used blogger to keep our work safe at all times and the fact that our blogs could be edited at any time was really helpful, because when we got feedback from our teachers, it allowed us to go back to existing blogs and improve them.  Blogger allowed us to store images and this was important because during our planning a lot of our research had to come together to explain our ideas and what influences came with them. Blogger is like a diary it is always kept up to date and allows us to view our blogs in chronological order, which means our work will never be mixed up and if we're looking for a specific blog it can be found quick and easily. 

This is an example of how i used blogger to post images: 

The below slideshow shows some images of my research and planning blogs: 

Apps and Website:

There are many useful apps and websites that we were able to use in conjunction with blogger to present our work. Prezie was a really popular one because it allowed us to attach images and videos with it, which made  the work we were displaying more interesting and eye catching, it allowed us to select different kind of design and layouts to present our work. Prezie is quick and easy to put on blogger all that needed to be done was to copy the correct URL link straight onto blogger. Slideshare is also a useful website to present our work because we were able to make presentations and just added them onto Slideshare, have the URL link copied and directly pasted onto blogger. GIF Maker was a really valuable website for displaying images, on GIF Maker you are able to present the images in any position you like and the images also move by flicking in the order you chose them too. Photo bucket and Kizoa are apps that I used to demonstrate different images, on these apps I was able to add as many images as I wanted to and also add transitions which made the images more dazzling.  

How I Used Kizoa: 

How I Used Slideshare: 

How i used GIF Maker: 

YouTube:

We used the internet for many research purposes such as YouTube which allowed us to access different kind of relevant videos. Watching videos on YouTube helped us to analyse them in detail such as analysing what genre each music video belonged to and what aspects of the video helped to make this genre clear for example the visual look, which in turn helped us gain ideas and become influenced by what we watched. Watching YouTube videos also allowed us to identify key elements of different music videos such as how many base tracks are used, how many costume changes the artist has and who may be there target audience and how do we know this? YouTube allowed us to view different songs by different artists and because we had a large variety of choice we were able to listen to each song and figure out which song would best suit our idea and help create and make our idea real.

Google:

We were able to access Google through the internet which allowed us to find out all the information needed for planning our video such as, to find out how existing artists are promoted and how their music videos are promoted through social media such as Twitter, Instagram and fan pages. We needed to make sure we chose an appropriate production company that we were going to use for our promotion and through research on Google we did this. Google gave us the opportunity to collect pictures of what we were researching such as real ancillary products for example Ellie Gouldings and be influenced by this work.

Photoshop:

Final Cut Pro:

Speeding up footage:

Final Cut pro is an important media technology that we used for editing our music videos, an example of why we used final cut pro is to speed up our footage and in the above clip I have shown you an example of how this was done. Changing the pace of movement on a certain shot makes it more exciting and appealing, it also follows Carol Vernallis's theory - the camera movement and speed tend to move in time with the beat of the song. In our music video we also have slow motion, and this is also done in the same way as speeding up the footage only your decrease the pace.

Fade: 

The video above is an example of a transition we used in our music video which allowed us to fade two shots together, I think this effect is really attractive because it's a more existing way to go into a new shots, it is also a good way to finish a certain shot, which is why we added a fade at the end of our music video when Umar recognises Farha but she walks away and we were able to combine this with slow motion.

Base Tracks: 

Final Cut Pro allowed us to put many base tracks together, and in the order of our choice, it allowed us to cut certain parts of each shot and arrange them in the best suitable order. All the edits, including jump cuts were ordered through the base tracks, which made it easier to erase parts of the video that was not needed. By using base tracks we were able to structure the whole music video as it allowed us to show our audience shots from day to night.