Question 4

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

New technologyies have played a major role throughout our project, and from planning right through to post-production we have used a wide array of technologies. It has been really exciting working again with technology we have become familiar with over the last couple of years as well as new forms of technology that we have been introduced to in this project and it has given us new ways to produce, display and interact with our work.

To display our progress throughout the project we have used blogs, both individually and as a group. I find writing a blog post much more effective than writing progress down on a sheet of paper and it is a much more interactive way of working - allowing us to post pictures, videos and documents we have been working on throughout. It also gave us a way to communicate as a group, posting on the group blog and updating each other on what we've done individually.

Research + Planning

For the research and planning stage of the project, the internet was a very important tool to help us learn more about the conventions of music videos and to find a direction for ours. YouTube was very useful to us as we found a lot of inspiration for our reverse technique in videos posted on YouTube - both professional and amateur - and also inspiration from similar artists music videos.

Facebook was another great way of interacting with each other as a group. We were able to talk together and arrange meeting times. We also discussed possible problems such as the weather forecast for the shoot, without Facebook this would have been a much harder thing to do, phoning round and making sure everyone knew the same thing.

Production

When constructing our product, we used many types of technology; Stills Cameras, a HD Video Camera, Studio Lighting, Tripod and Editing software were just a few. We had used some of this equipment and software on previous projects but I feel the new techniques we learn on this project really advanced our ability to use them.

The camera we used to film our video with was a Canon HV30. It filmed in high definition which was extremely important for this project as we wanted to achieve the highest quality footage that was possible for our video and the richness and depth of shot that this piece of technology gave us really helped achieve this goal. It was vital that the colours in our video were vibrant and made the video come to life, and the quality of the camera allowed us to gain that effect.

A lot of shots we took during the production were stills of the artist, either singing or walking past the camera, and although a tripod is maybe not a new form of media technology, it was crucial to help us film those shots in a professional manner. We had used a tripod before so there wasn't much to learn about using them, but it was still a vital piece of kit.


Editing

After shooting the video, we had weeks of editing shots and piecing together the footage. The software we used for this was Adobe Premiere Pro, a programme we'd all used before. The software is relatively easy to use but there were techniques that we needed for this project that we hadn't used before and the whole group had to learn these new techniques;

•  It was important that we maintained a similar contrast throughout the video and also that the colours throughout looked sharp and vibrant. To do this we learnt how to properly colour correct the shots and change the contrast for every shot. It was a long process but made the finished piece look a lot more professional.

• In order to make sure the video wasn't monotonous and boring, we edited the shots so that most of them cut to the beat. This made the video a lot more choppy and interesting, making sure we kept the audiences attention. We also had a four-screen split screen at one part of the song, with each split appearing on each word - a technique that worked well and looked very effective.



• The reverse footage theme was the most important effect througout our video and we learnt how to do this very quickly. Originally I thought it would be a hard technique to put into practice but in fact all it involved was taking the shot you wanted to reverse and going to the clip speed/duration setting and changing it to 'reverse speed'.

Ancillary Texts



For both the album cover photoshoot and the website photoshoot, we used a Canon 400D Digital SLR. We experimented with different lighting in the studio, using both the studio lights and the floor lights. This allowed us to get some very well lit shots, and even some with colour.

In terms of editing the photos, we used Adobe Photoshop, a piece of software that I have been a familiar with for years. We changed the contrast on some shots and used different layers to achieve different effects.

Website

To develop the website, we used a site called Wix. It was very user friendly and made creating our artists' website very easy. I learned how to create an industry style website from scratch and it was interesting to learn what goes into creating a website for a music artist. We created a flash based website that looked a lot more aesthetically pleasing than a myspace page or blog, and it actually looked professional!

The website works in synergy with other interactive platforms like Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Facebook showing how technological convergence is important. This convergence is a recent thing, only coming about in the industry in the last couple of years so to involve this in our project added a professional feel.

Evaluation

We also used technology to advertise our official screening. The group created a Facebook event which we invited all our friends to - this is a much better way of raising awareness than word of mouth and also very relevant to our audience.