Question 4 – How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the research of our video we firstly used youtube to watch clips of other music videos such as ‘Genie in a bottle’ by Christina Aguilera and ‘I love rock ‘n’ roll’ by Britney Spears as decided we wanted to create a POP genre song. We liked the concept of a song from a movie as we could completely re-vamp the original video. Youtube was also a quick way to watch videos of all genres as you didn’t have to sit and watch the full video, as watching the first 30 seconds of a clip can let you know if you like the video etc…

We set up a blog on www.blogger.com so we could keep up to date with our progression through our tasks. Doing this helped us add images to our blog and make it easier to write our ideas out fully and use the software to our advantages as we didn’t have to only use it in college like some software. Through blogger we also used slideshare for our evaluation and research and planning side of our coursework. This is a free programme to upload documents from any Microsoft Office document as this is the easiest and quickest option and also looks professional to go onto our blogs.

This image shows a Microsoft Word document that I have loaded to slideshare. As you can see if there was more than 2 pages to the document then you could easily click the left and right buttons to view it.

This image shows the slideshare homepage. To upload a piece of work you simply have t click on the ‘upload’ button and your files get converted into a document that is safe to upload to blogger. This shows how technology has shifted as just a few year ago this wouldn’t have been able to happen, this also shows that we have thought about different ways to present our work.

To edit our video we firstly had to get the footage off the camera to the computer. We used I-movie to firstly upload our footage. From there we highlighted the bits of the footage we wanted and saved it into a file called ‘film footage’. This screen shot shows how we can highlight the bits of footage we want to add into our video and drop it into place. This second screen shot shows how it looks once dragging and dropping it into place. This is a simple and easy way of picking out pieces of footage that we would use in our video and the not so good pieces.

Once we had the footage we needed, then we opened final cut to edit our video. The screen shot below shows that we exported the footage from the camera so we had a blank canvas to work from to edit. We added all our video clips to final cut so we could see what we had to work with so we could start editing, each video shows separate clips of what we have filmed and as you can see from the screen grab we have enough footage to make a good music video. However as both of us have limited knowledge of final cut, editing our video took more time than we wanted as we found some of the footage was hard to grasp what we were singing and how to cut it. We had the advantage of using the ‘In and out markers’ however to make our music video in sync with the lyrics. The image to the right the right

shows how we used the in and out markers by lining up both clip and song to the part where we wanted it to sync. This then made editing our video better for us as we could also use the cutting tool to cut the clips up so they could skip to one and then back to the other. This is so our video wasn’t all one long piece of footage where the audience would get bored and want to stop watching the video. This also helped cut up the narrative from the performance as we wanted to incorporate both of these in our video.

To cut out parts of the footage that we didn’t want in then we used the image and wire frame tool. This image shows how we could drag the middle of the cross further in or out to the point where we wanted. This was also to identify the

narrative of our video as we wanted the audience to see both male and female characters in their happy period of their relationship before things went downhill. When finally finishing the video we rendered it all, as we did throughout making it and then exported it to quicktime. This was so we could upload it to youtube and put it on our blogs.

To make our digipack and advert, we used photo shop. Here we could use a range of tools and equipment to make them stand out and look professional. We could edit an image by taking out the original background and replacing it with a different colour. Although this image isn’t on our final digipack or advert, this was one of our first ideas. However this image was just a screen shot from our video, and shows no originality or thought so we decided to create a completely different style of photo by taking one ourselves. This worked out better as we could use more tools to create the digipack and advert that is our final ones. On photo shop we also used layers, this is so we could create the best possible outcome to our work as possible, and by using one layer at a time helped us focus on one image or part of the digipack or advert so that it would look more professional.