EVALUATION QUESTION FOUR

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

RESEARCH/PRE-PRODUCTIONMUSIC VIDEO

One of the most important platforms I used when finding the track for the music video was Soundcloud, this allowed me to browse independent artist’s work and find something that would reflect our ideas. After finding James Edge on Soundcloud we were able to listen to each of his tracks and find the most fitting piece for our narrative, this was extremely useful and helped us with an essential part our production.

Using the internet I could also browse other artist’s music videos, this was another aspect of planning that was hugely important. Sites such as YouTube or Vimeo allowed me to access music videos that may relate to our artists style or genre of music.

PRINT PRODUCTIONS

For the print production Soundcloud was again useful, in browsing independent artists of the same genre I could then look on the internet for their album art and gain inspiration.

iTunes was another platform that was useful in finding inspiration for my print productions, in having a wide range of album art available to browse I could find digipaks of artists similar to our chosen track and look for conventions or styles that related to them. It also allowed me to group albums into genre, and so I could see the conventions of each. Google images was also useful when looking for inspirations, I could find specific album covers that related to the folk genre.

MUSIC VIDEOFILMING

For the entire shoot we used the Canon EOS 600D with the standard 18-55mm lens to produce an HD video. Although at points we used our mobile phones to take photographs of the shoot, for the most part the Canon was used to capture shots of the location too. It has an automated focus although often, due to busy locations such as the Museum taking the focus away from our protagonist, the manual focus was used. This also allowed us to play around with the a softer focus for some shots, such as this one below of our protagonist surrounded by glass casing- this created a harsh setting when the autofocus was used and so we decided to pull the focus out a little in order to soften it.

The Canon is also very easy to use, the members of the group that had not used it before were able to easily shoot parts of our video in all of the different locations/ in various lighting.The camera also has a foldable playback screen and so we could continuously watch our footage back and adjust anything we needed to accordingly.

During the shoot our mobile phones were also useful in finding the locations we knew we wanted to film in, and also contacting each member of our group.

MUSIC VIDEOEDITING

We used Adobe Premier Pro C56 to edit our video, this was a familiar program as we had used it to edit our previous Media projects and so, knowing the basics, we were able to experiment with tools and editing techniques we had not used before. The first thing we needed to do was upload all of the clips from the SD card onto the program, we then were able to watch each clip and choose the one’s we felt should be included in the video. The next stage was to place them in an order we were happy with, this was usually according to colour or shot type and was relatively easy as Premier Pro has a preview of each clip before you choose it. We were able to see immediately which clips were which and could go from there. We then used to the cutting tool to shorten some of the longer clips and cut anything we didn’t think was right for the video-such as a shot that had too much movement or was not the right colour.

The sound was next, we unlinked all of the diegetic sound from the videos in order for the music to be placed over all of the clips. After downloading the music file from Soundcloud we were able to place it into Premier Pro and drag it over the top of our edited video. We realised the music was slightly too long for the video (at around four minutes) and so again used the cutting tool to shorten the track (to nearer three minutes.

One aspect of this was editing the colour of our shots. Because we wanted the focus of our video to be the emphasis on the colours used throughout, often we would find shots that could be repeated but with an alternate colour. In this shot (right)for example the building was originally green, we copied the clip and altered one of them using the colour correct tools, adjusting the hue and brightness of the shots to achieve this blue colour. The saturation and hue tools were the most effective in altering the colours of the clips, allowing us to easily manipulate the colours to the exact shade we wanted.

MUSIC VIDEO EDITING

Throughout our piece we used a split screen effect on various shots. We would place clips side by side or one on top of the other, this was done through scaling down the clip to a reasonable size- e.g. for the blue and green shot the green clip needed to be scaled down to half its original size- and then we placed the two clips on top of each other by changing the positioning and then put both clips in the editing bar. This allowed for both clips to be seen at the same time and create the effect of a split screen. We also did this for the clips that had the same shot type, such as these three, to emphasise the various similar shots we had of our protagonist in different locations. Scaling down these clips also meant altering the dimensions so that they were all equal sized squares.

Through scaling down we could also achieve a mirror effect, we copied clips such as this one (below) and placed the same clip side by side. We could then horizontally flip one of them using the transform/ horizontal flip tool and create a mirror image. Sometimes we would also use the crop tool on the clip to ensure they had the same size and were not uneven.

Some of our clips were either too short or were shaky and so the solution was to slow them to 50-80% of their original speed, this soften any shaky shots and extended any clips we wanted to be longer.

PRINT PRODUCTIONSSHOOTING

When shooting for the print productions initially I thought it would be most effective to use the Canon 600D although after revision it seemed the photographs were too sharp in comparison to the folk genre of the track and the soft focus and mis-en-scene of our video.

I then decided to use the Lomokino movie maker which uses a 35mm film, although its primary function is to create small videos, it’s method of stop frame allowed for the film to be developed as lots of still photos. This was perfect for the print production as, unlike other more advanced film or digital cameras it produced a slightly more unpredictable photo. With limited control of the lighting, focus and shutter speed the photos produced were sometimes out of focus or over-exposed creating an interesting outcome that paired well with the genre and aesthetic of our video. This allowed for me to experiment with the rest of my print productions, whilst I could have only used photos from the Lomokino, it seemed the use of sharp graphics would complement it perfectly. These hand-drawings would then be scanned and edited in Adobe Photoshop.

Lomokino super 35mm Movie Maker with Lomography Movie Viewer.

PRINT PRODUCTIONDIGIPAK-unedited images

After getting the photos from the Lomokino developed, I could clearly see the film had a blue tint. This could have been due to a number of factors for example, the lighting/weather conditions since it is difficult to adjust the exposure.From this I decided the most effective thing to do would be to draw the protagonist using a biro, colour shade over it with a blue pastel and scan it on to Photoshop to be edited. The drawing of Cromer was inspired by photographs I took on the Canon 600D whilst we were filming, and allowed me to keep the content of these photographs whilst not only creating something that I could easily incorporate with my production but also keep the soft aesthetic of the promotional package.

PRINT PRODUCTIONEDITING- DIGIPAK PANEL ONE

I used Photoshop to manipulate the drawings and photographs for my digipak. The first panel didn’t require much in terms of editing as each aspect already had the correct colour although I did need to play around with the layout. At first I used the crop tool to scale down each picture and ensure they were all the same size.

My original design was to have an alternating pattern of the drawing of the protagonist and the photograph and to then mirror this vertically, although this seemed too crowded and so a different approach was taken. I knew however that I wanted to keep the mirrored effect as it referenced the mirrored shots in our video.

The next stage was to arrange a placement for them all, firstly I thought of having three larger photos of the protagonist with one drawing of our location behind her. This was fine although I felt the graphics needed to be more clearly referenced, and so eventually I decided that I should not only add the drawing of our character in the middle but also double the drawing of the location and have a mirrored effect on the top and bottom.

I then manipulated the colour of the piece to all blue although I could see the original colours were strong enough as they were. This did however allow me to experiment with the balance/ hue tool which I would later use.

PRINT PRODUCTION EDITING

DIGIPAK-PANELS TWO AND THREE Unlike panel one, panels two and three required a colour alteration to yellow. At first I used the hue tool to adjust the colour although found that yellow seemed to always appear a brown colour or hardly show in a peach shade. As the blues for the first panel were slightly muted I changed the brightness and saturation of two of the same drawing in order to compare colours with my first panel.

Eventually I found two shades had a clear yellow colour and would show the original drawing. Although initially the darker picture (right) was a firm choice as it clearly showed the drawing, I used the sharpen tool on the lighter one (left) and the drawing became much clearer. I then decided to place them one on top of the other to match the mirror effect used in the video and first panel.

PRINT PRODUCTION EDITING- PANEL FOUR/FONT

For panel four the colour of the two blue images on panel one needed to be altered to green. Using Photoshop’s hue and saturation tool this was fairly easy as, unlike the yellow panels, the original image was already a colour similar to the final one. Photoshop’s lightness tool also helped with this, I changed the brightness of the picture whilst changing the hue to green in order for it to be clear.

The sharpen tool was used here again to ensure the drawing was clearly visible after changing the brightness and colour of the picture.

After experimenting with layout I found the most effective way to arrange pictures would be to have an alternating strip of the picture and drawing down the left hand side, and then have the drawing of our location on the top and vertically flipped on the bottom. I also sharpened the drawing of the location in order to ensure it would be visible after printing.

Panels one and four also required fonts and so using the website ‘Dafont’ I could choose any font from a wide range and download it to Photoshop easily.

MAGAZINE ADVERT EDITING

For the magazine advert the main editing was in adding colour to the pictures in the background of the drawing and alter the layout within the background, taking out any busy areas that may cause the advert to feel cluttered to ensure the focus was always on the protagonist. I used the blur tool to achieve this.

To alter the colour again, like the other panels, I selected the pieces I wanted to adjust and changed the hue to different shades. Unlike the other panels I did not want a string colour and so left the brightness at it’s original level, this allowed for me to gain a solid colour whilst still maintaining the background drawing and not overpowering the rest of the advert.

Original drawing (top) and altered background (bottom)

DISTRIBUTION/FEEDBACK/EVALUATION

Blogger was an essential platform for my music video, it allowed me to upload all of my research and inspiration from other websites such as Youtube or Itunes so that I could refer back to it whenever necessary. Blogger also allowed me to arrange and label my work in a way that could be easily read, this helped when creating the final edit of my video and print production as it allowed for me to quickly return to my previous inspirations.

I used Youtube to upload my music video, this allowed for it to be distributed using the same platform as most music videos allowing for it to follow conventions of a music video and for me to be able to upload it to my Blogger account.My feedback was mostly through physical copies of questionnaires however Youtube allowed for feedback to be through comments on my video. In uploading my video to Blogger I was also able to gain feedback throughout from my tutor. My Blogger account is also attached to my personal email so that whenever I received feedback I could see it immediately. Social networking was also essential for my feedback, Facebook allowed me to message people of my demographic for immediate feedback. Word PowerPoint was the main platform I used during my evaluation and when researching other music videos, this allowed me to place all of the relevant information besides picture or links. To upload to Blogger these also needed to be uploaded to Slideshare, this immediately uploaded my PowerPoints and provided an HTML link for me to embed them into my blog posts.