1. Daniella Lawrence Question 4
A2 Media production
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning
and evaluation stages?
During the construction of our media product, we were given the chance to use a
variety of different technologies and were taught how to make use of different
techniques such as split screen and apply them to our video. I found that learning
these techniques were very useful as it has made a big difference to the quality of my
production. Technologies such as Adobe Premiere Pro allow you to make your own
music video, making them less time consuming but still very professional.
Before actually creating our production we
were given the opportunity to create an
animatic using Windows Movie Maker on our
laptops. We made our story board and took
pictures of the shots. We then uploaded them
onto the computer so we could rearrange them
in an order that we would want our production
to be. This enabled us to achieve an understanding of how our production would be
and allowed us to experiment with transitions and effects that we might want to use.
This is an effective technique as it gives you a plan of what to do when you come to
editing the real production.
Throughout the course of making our music video we
have been using a blog as our production diary to show
how we have been developing our ideas and how the
production was beginning to take place. It also helped in
keeping track of where we were going with our production.
BlogSpot is an online site that enables you to create and
personalise your own blog were you can post information
on your production, photos and videos. This is an effective site as it is able to keep a
record of production of our music video; BlogSpot has been equally useful in the
sense that we can upload research and cases studies.

2. Daniella Lawrence Question 4
A2 Media production
The internet has been great use to us throughout the production of our music video as
it has enabled us to look for our artists and try to contact them through there MySpace
page or email. This has been extremely important as we wanted to try and gain
permission from our artist before using their song for copyright reasons. Such
technologies have developed extremely of the years as there were no such equipment
that could help in the production of a video. Many years ago editors would have to
hand make their videos by cutting the film reels from the camera by hand and gluing
the clips wanted together as they were limited on the technologies we are lucky to
have today, e.g. editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro. New media
technologies that we are able to use today are very effective as they allow you to
make multiple videos in a shorter amount of time than in the old days. It has opened
doors to independent artists where they can now make their own videos at low costs.
When filming our music video we were given the opportunity to
use two cameras to film with, one being a normal hand held and
the other being a HD hand held camera. We took this opportunity
as we would then be able to film two different shots at the same
time, instead of repeating the shot to film at different angles. This
also enabled us to use a wide variety of shots in a smaller amount of time. We also
thought that this would be helpful in case we wanted to experiment and place two
pieces of footage on top of each other within the production.
Whilst creating a production you have to ensure that
you use a variety of camera techniques such as panning,
zoom, close-up’s, long-shot’s, mid-shot’s as it provides
variety and develops the representation. For example,
panning was something we used within our production
as we wanted to highlight how we merged an urban

3. Daniella Lawrence Question 4
A2 Media production
area with an extremely glamorous artist and that was one way we tried to challenge
the conventions of the genre. Having a variety of shots within a production keeps it
interesting and the shots you use tend to create meaning to what you are filming.
Close-ups were something that was often used in our production as it is a key feature
of music videos as they show facial expression and create meaning for the viewer.
Adobe premiere is the software we used for the editing of our production, it enabled
us to take clips from the footage we filmed and helped us turn them into our final
production. The software enabled us to select our clips, crop, edit or even modify
them. In short the Adobe Premiere Pro software is sophisticated enough that it nearly
gives you total control of changing the clips to the way you want them to be. For
example, I wanted to change some of my clips to monochromes as I felt it would be
more effective for the viewer. This was a
very exciting experience as I managed to
understand how media products are truly
manufactured and it made me applaud the
wide opportunities of such technologies. I
have added effects such as making some
of the clips monochrome as I felt it would
give a twist to the video and make it more
appealing to the audience. On this
software I was also able to make some of my clips slightly darker by changing the
contrast and brightness of the clips as I felt they were a little too light and didn’t fit
with the rest of the video.
Overall, such technologies have changes the way music video can now be produced,
providing more control over what you can do, such as adding colour effects and

4. Daniella Lawrence Question 4
A2 Media production
transitions. They enable people to apply their ideas onto their videos, creating
effective videos for their audiences.