Evaluation Activity 4

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

Research:

When doing the research for our music video and ancillary products, the internet played a main role in allowing us to watch and analyse similar music videos, digipacks and adverts in order to get new ideas for our project.

Google is a particularly important website that my group and I used to research into unsigned artists and songs, record labels, RnB/Hip-Hop genre conventions, music magazines, etc. However, Google is not the only good website for instant access to music, YouTube is also significantly important. This is because YouTube plays a dominant role in promoting signed and unsigned bands as anybody can play their singles for free online. As a result, it allowed us to get ideas from other music videos and, as we had instant access to thousands of new talent, it allowed us to pick a good unsigned song for our music video. But not only we used YouTube to research unsigned artist, I also used it  to research and analyze existing professional music videos specific  to our music genre of RnB and Hip-hop.

I also used Sky music channels such as “MTV,” “AKA”, “The Vault”, “VIVA” and “Kiss” to watch other RnB and HipHop music videos to help me gain ideas of what type of camera angles, shots and effects we could use for our music video.

As a group we created an audience research questionnaire in Survey Monkey so we could understand and identify our target audiences

I used Prezi to create my Star Study and my music videos analysis because it is a very interesting and interactive way of presenting information.

I also used Time Glider to create a timeline of the history of music magazines an of the history of music videos, as it is a very easy to use website and result is quite effective and interesting.

Planning:

Blogger has been an important part in the production of our music video and print productions throughout our coursework. Our blog has been a key element to keep record of all our research and planning, allowing us to show our journey and how we developed our creative and technological skills throughout this project.

In terms of our music video planning, we used it to upload our initial ideas and sketch to the blog, which made it easier to decide which ones were the strongest for our music video and ancillary products. We also used our blog to record the times when our group would meet to plan, shoot and edit our music video and produce our ancillary products.

Moreover, in terms of recording planning for both of our ancillary products, the blog was great as it enabled us to upload pictures of sketches and possible digipack covers and show our teachers so they could immediately evaluate and leave comments to help me improve my planning in order to achieve the highest grade possible.

Social Networks such as Facebook and Msn/Hotmail were used as the main way of communication between the members of our group when we weren’t at school. It also allowed us to remind extras and the people that were helping with the filming and production of our music video the times, dates and locations that they needed to be at. This proved to be a very cheap, quick and effective way of communication.

The use of digital cameras allowed us to take appropriate pictures of possible locations and settings so we could then upload them to our blog and discuss them as a group. We also created our Animatic on iMovie HD by tacking pictures of our storyboard with a digital camera and then we uploaded the video to the blog.

iMovie HD was also used to edit the footage of our digipack discussion as it is very simple and quick to edit clips with this software.

I used Google Calendar to stay organised and to manage my time more effectively. I also used it to plan our group meetings and filming and editing schedule to make sure that there were no clashes with personal arrangements. 

We used Microsoft Powerpoint to create presentations  on our work and Microsoft Word was used troughout the whole coursework to create our magazine advertisement and dijipack analysis and research documents. I uploaded some of this documents to SlideShare, as it is a very easy way to upload documents to our blog.

Construction:

We used a Kodak PlaySport video camera and my iPod Nano 5 alongside a tripod to shoot our music video. These cameras used allowed us to get HD footage and, as they are both small cameras, we were able to get more interesting angles and shots. The tripod was used to keep a very steady shot and to adjust the height so we could either shoot from a low angle or high angle.

We also used a mobile phone to play the music while we were filming to make sure that our lip syncing was as accurate as possible.

We edited the footage using Final Cut Express on a Mac, which enabled us to include many editing effects appropriate to our genre and song choice to achieve a product of high standard, although this software was more difficult to use and understand than iMovie.                                                                                                                                                                      

The main software we used for both of our ancillary products were Paint and  Adobe Photoshop cs5. Photoshop allowed us to use a wide range of colouring and lighting effects, and special effects in order to manipulate the high quality photographs taken from a DSLR camera. Thanks to this camera we were able to take great pictures of our male character/rapper that make our magazine advertisement and digipack look effective and professional. I already had experience working with this software which helped our editing to be quicker and of a higher quality.

We got the fonts for our album and magazine titles(“J.REYEZ”, “TakeOver”) from Dafont.com.

Evaluation:
Social networking sites such as Facebook enabled my group and I to gain audience feedback on our music video, which was crucial in helping us to understand where our music video needed improving. We posted our music video from YouTube, allowing our peers to leave comments with either positive/negative feedback, which was a very easy and efficient way to gain quick audience feedback.

YouTube also allows our audience to have immediate access to our music video, which is important it helps us getting more feedback from a wider audience and it is a good and easy way of promoting it.

We used “Go! Animate” to create the Evaluation Question 2 as we thought that creating an animation was a more interesting and creative idea than filming ourselves.

We used digital cameras to take appropriate stills of us using the equipment so I could then process them onto my evaluation. Paint and Microsoft PowerPoint were also used to create and edit the 9 frame analysis’ image on the Evaluation Question 1.
NCESKids allowed us to create graphs for our Prezi Evaluation Activity 3 presentation to show the audience feedback we got in a more visually pleasing way.