How did you use media technology in the construction and

research, and evaluation?

Question 4

Media technologies we included in our music video include:

YouTube was one of the most important media technologies in our whole project as we used it for various things

At the start of the project we used it to gain inspiration for our initial ideas. We knew that we wanted to go into the indie rock genre but we didn’t really have anywhere to start off at. Once we looked at already existing media products we knew we had a starting point that we could use to get better and better ideas.

Once we had then chose the style of video, we again used YouTube, this time to look at individual things within music videos, in particular the style of band shots used in the genre of music that we where using. It was important that we didn’t stray far away for the common conventions of the genre as then our video would look more genuine. We included shots including close ups of both instruments and the band members playing them, as this was common in the videos we viewed.

As you can see, we looked at videos from the band foals and copied the dress style in their videos (skinny jeans and vans), but we did not use the same colour jeans because we didn’t want it to look like we where directly copying.

Photoshop was used for both of our ancillary tasks, the digipak and advert, and it helped us create visually attractive images that we thought made our photos look better set for our products.

The advert was the first to be finished but as you can see, it did not look as good as we had first hoped. We realised that we had made the font at the bottom of the advert too big and it looked unrealistic. We also realised that we could have included a lot more information at the bottom of the screen that we had missed because of the huge font size.

This is our final advert and we feel like Photoshop helped dramatically. Once we realised the previous design was not up to scratch, we quickly decided on what needed changing. We chose to get rid of the background image and have a plain black background as we felt that this looked better and more like an actual poster as it makes the image of the band stand out more.

We also added various small elements to the bottom of the advert like adding the name of our company as well as making the font smaller which we felt would look better once blown up to a bigger image.

This is the site we used to get all of the documents we created for our blogger onto the actual blogger site. This allowed us to include images on our documents and it was very easy to link to websites like blogger, the site we needed to incorporate with our finished media product.

For near enough every piece of research and planning we used the site to get the text onto blogger and it was really simple as the method of getting a file onto the site was a simple click and grab from your folder on your computer to the website. This included work including music video and digipak analysis and things required for planning for example out call sheets and shooting schedule.

We used Blogger for the majority of the project as a place to store and present all of our work. This included all of the research, planning, construction and evaluation questions that make up the course. It was very simple to use as we used it both years for AS and A2. It was important that this was set out in a clear fashion so that people viewing our work would not struggle to find each individual part of our work.

The tabs Research, Planning, Construction and Evaluation helped distinguish which piece of work was done for a specific reason, whether that be to give us initial ideas on how to set out our video or things involving us actually planning our video.

Final Cut is the editing software that we used to edit all of the rough cuts and the final cut of our video. The editing software was very easy to use and this helped me create the video relatively quickly. I had never used editing software before but it was really simple to pick up and everything was laid out so that everything was in a place where it was needed.

The videos in their rough form where imported in the top right corner and it was very easy to drag these down into the timeline. Because we where creating a video it was also useful to have this timeline because it allowed us to do things very well such as lip syncing as we could get the timings very precise when various lyrics where sung.

To get ideas for our digipak and advert ideas we looked at existing magazine articles which had adverts for different bands in them. From this we got the idea of having our photo against a background different to the actual photo. This would help the image stand out from the rest of the adverts and was common within the articles that we looked at.

In particular we looked at an article of Foals, the band that we where creating a video of because we thought that this would help us capture the band’s essence.

We used Glogster to create the mood board right at the start of the project as we thought that this would help us create an idea to stick to when thinking of ideas. It is very important to make sure you always have a main idea of what you want to achieve and we accomplished this with a well set out mood board. The image contains images of all our initial ideas, this includes fire and a sunset, two things that didn’t actually end up in our final product, however they both link in to the theme of our video as the sun represents the morning after the hangover and the fire represents a fire that the teens would be hanging around in the garden whilst drinking.

Glogster was very helpful to us as everything we needed was on the page for us. The easy accessibility of things such as videos, images and sounds was helpful and it helped us create this “plan” of what we want to achieve in the final video.