How Did You Use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Hardware: The first media technology that was a massive part in the filming of my main product was the camera I used a Canon Legria HF R606, the Canon enabled me to get the shots I needed in order to construct my final product. I was able to loan the cameras and SD cards out of college so I could film in the desired locations (the green room and the Westwood). To do this I also needed a tripod to make sure the parts of my music video that I didn’t want to look hand held staying still.

TRIPOD HAND HELD

I used the MAC computers as my main source of where to put my footage. The reason I used a MAC computer instead of a standard computer was because of the software such as Final Cut Pro was only installed on the MACS. With the MAC computers, once you chose a MAC to upload your footage and edit on you couldn’t swap around and use different MAC’s you had to stick to the one you started editing on. This proved quite a problem when everyone came to their editing stage as everyone wanted to use the computers, so you had to book them out which became quite a struggle as sometimes you would book one and someone would be already sat there! With this standing, I stayed a couple of nights after college till around 5:30 so I could use my MAC and get my editing done.

For making my ancillary texts I used a standard computer, so I could access my work at any computer that had Photoshop installed. My memory stick was a key piece of hardware, as this stored all my film clips, research and planning, ancillary texts throughout the whole of my A2 year. However just in case I happened to loose my memory stick, I backed up all my work on a hard drive at home. This way if my memory stick happened to break or I happened to lose it (easily done, believe me) then I would have all my work saved on my hard drive, in which I just needed a USB cable to upload it back onto the MAC or standard computer. Every time I transferred shots to the MAC from the SD card, I put them on my memory stick as well as most of the time when you hand the SD cards back in from loan, the get wiped. I used my mobile phone for audience research footage and also the text messages that I gained in evaluation question 3. My phone was useful for taking pictures of the chosen hair and costume as well, which can be seen earlier in my planning and production. Lighting was a major part in my green room shots. In order to have a clear white background, I needed the professional green room lighting for this. The lights had to be correctly adjusted, so there was no reflection of my characters shadow on the green screen.

Software: Final Cut Pro was my governing software as this is were I produced my music video and all the edits, transitions, colour effects, etc. that went with it. This software enabled me to have the potential to create my music video however I wanted it. As I’d never used it before it took me a bit of getting used to, but once I got the hang of it and explored all the different features I was able to produce my music video more professionally. The only problem that I had was when I wanted a certain effect or transition idea in my head but couldn’t seem to find one that fitted it on the software – suppose that’s like anything though really! I used Adobe Photoshop for the production of my two ancillary texts, I feel this production went well as I had already used Adobe Photoshop in my first year and since then my skills have only developed. So I found the production process of that a lot quicker as I already knew most of the important basic tools. Blogger was obviously a dominant software in the producing of my whole coursework as this is where all my work can be located. I quite enjoyed using this software as all your work is in one place and you can design it personally to you, the only criticism that I would really have is the amount of time it took videos and embedded links to load.

I used YouTube not only to upload to but on my blog. I imported a number of music videos from the YouTube software to show my inspiration videos, ones that I found were similar to my own and ones that I liked the ideas from. Then YouTube was used to upload my actual music video from Final Cut Pro, so I could then embed it onto my blog and also so the public eye could view it. It was a useful site for me to gain feedback from peers, without me actually having to be present. Prezi and SlideShare were another two of the softwares that appear on my blog. These softwares were just a different way of displaying my research and ideas on my blog to make it more interesting for the viewer. I found them both fairly easy to use and a good way in displaying work, however the only difficulty that I overcame was that the Prezi site did crash a little and lagged sometimes, so I had to make sure I was constantly saving my work. StoryBoardThat was used in the production of my story board – clues in the name. I thought the site was a proficient way of conveying the ideas of your music video with timings etc. However you could only use up to 6 square boxes otherwise you had to pay to use it, this became a little bit time consuming as we had to keep screenshotting the 6 squares that you had done, then delete them and onto the next 6 squares and so on. The other problem was because the story board was so early on in the production of my music video, I didn’t feel as though I had all my ideas ready and therefore maybe had a shorter storyboard than if I produced it maybe a month prior to the end of filming.