media

1. Evaluation Question Four: How
did you use media technologies
in the construction, research,
planning and evaluation stage?

2. Research
• When researching, my group and myself used mainly
secondary sources from the internet to gain some
knowledge about the music industry and how to make a
video successful. Firstly we needed to learn and establish
what was and made up a music video, so we did some
research on Wikipedia and found the definition and read
some more of the history behind music videos and
where they began.
• As most resources do, Wikipedia can be seen as
unreliable as it is anonymous anyone can post
information on there. Although it proved to be useful to
us as it enabled us to expand on knowledge that we
already knew.

3. Further research
• Another helpful secondary resource we used was the Media
Magazine website. We found an interview with Suzy Davis, an
interview with Pete Fraser and an extract from Simon Frith’s
book ‘Sound and Vision: A Music Video Reader’.
• The article about award winning editor, Suzy Davis, was helpful
as she focused on editing as she is an expert on it; this really
helped our group as that was the aspect our coursework that we
found most difficult. As Pete Fraser is chief examiner for the OCR
Media Studies board, the article about him proved to be really
useful as he has an extensive knowledge about the subject but
he also demonstrated what we have to do create a high quality
video in order to achieve a high grade. Simon Frith’s book,
helped us as it highlighted some key ideas such
as commodification, textual schizophrenia and post modern
disappearance of reality.

4. Getting inspiration
• As well as reading some inforamtion, we decided to get some inspiration
and actually watch some existing music videos. We used the site Youtube
to watch them on as it holds millions of videos. Firstly we watched pop-up
videos such as Goo Goo Dolls- Iris deconstruction through to the latest
music videos for new songs released in 2014.
• Watching multiple exisiting videos gave us some new and interesting ideas
to incorporate into our video. It also allowed us to confirm what genre we
wanted to make our video and it helped us decided if we wanted to do
a narrative, performance or concept based video.
• Howevever the copyright laws on YouTube did create a slight problem
when using the site for research.

5. Planning
• As we started to plan our video, we listened to our final song choice
on iTunes and then constructed a list of any thoughts that appeared in our
minds when listening closely to the lyrics. This helped us massively to form
ideologies to include in our video that would fit the songs sub-culture.
• Next we took pictures of possible locations to base and shoot our music video
at, we used an iPhone 5c.
• A lot of our planning was done on paper as we would make notes and diagrams
on what we wanted to achieve from our music video.

6. Construction
• For constructing the first draft of our music video, we used a DSLR
Canon handheld video recorder. This camera was high quality and
allowed us to get different angles focus in/out to create a professional
appearance.
• Looking at previous clips and pictures taken on Ellie’s iPhone 5c we
decided to use it to film as we liked the quality and the freedom it
gave us. This device actually resulted in better quality than the proper
camera and it was much easier for us to export our footage from. We
did also carry around a tripod to our location with us but didn’t use it
as it restricted our camera work as oppose to free hand.

7. Filming
• When filming the dance scenes in our video, we made use of
the professional lights in the drama studios at school.
Unfortunately, they did not have a strobe light which we wanted
for our video, but we made the best of the situation and used a
normal white light and flicked the switch on and off, the sped the
footage up in post-production to give a similar effect.
• We used a projector when filming our flashback scenes to play
the party footage over Ellie, lip-syncing. We feel like this idea
worked really well as it enabled us to add narrative in a unique
and innovative way. We had originally used iMovie to play our
footage form but it caused it to lag the footage causing our lip-
syncing to look out of time and unprofessional; so instead we
used Windows Media Player.

8. Editing our video
• Throughout the editing process we used Final Cut Pro on the Apple
MacBook's. We used many editing features available on the software
such as: dissolve, black and white, colour match, slow-motion, text
and reverse. Using these editing features allowed us to make our
video look and professional and aesthetically pleasing. The experience
gained last year when creating our AS coursework made us already
familiar with the software. To avoid problems other groups had faced
by losing their work, we always made sure to back up our work using
the hard drive.

9. Editing digipak
• We then went on to create a promotional advert and digipak for our
other ancillary texts. To edit our images for both, we used Adobe
Photoshop. As my group and myself had very little experience using
this software we found this process more difficult. So to solve this
problem we watched some Youtube tutorials to show us the basics,
there we also learnt how to remove a green screen. Overall we found
Photoshop a very useful editing software for our digipak and advert
as it enabled us to import our images and add effects such
as overlay’s and colour changes easily and effectively.

10. Evaluation
• At the end of our coursework it was time for us to evaluate of our
music video. We again used media technologies such as YouTube to
upload our music video onto our blogs. This created a easy and
accessible way for our target audience to watch our video and give us
feedback (helpful for further evaluation).
• We also used Microsoft Word to create questionnaires for our target
audience. Using the data we collected we then created pie and bar
charts on Microsoft Excel. This way of displaying our findings proved
to be beneficial as it abled us and our teacher to easily see our
feedback.