A2 media evaluation question 4

1. 4. HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN
THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH,
PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

2. Throughout all stages of making our music
video we used a variety of different types of
technology and multiple programs, such as:

3. RESEARCH
During our research stage I used YouTube to research music videos in my genre,
I did this on the iMac. Google was another useful search engine that I used
while undergoing my research, I used google to search through digipaks
from artists who are part of the rap and grime genre which I was looking at to
gain inspiration from by looking at their artwork and layout that they had on
their past and present digipaks. I also used my smartphone to do some
music video research as I had access to iTunes which is an excellent place
to do some research as most artists have their front cover of their digipak, at
least ,on their so it gave me quick and reliable access to artists artwork. I
used YouTube mostly to watch music videos within our genre and also in
completely different genres so that I could get a better understanding of
what conventions were specific in the rap/grime genre in hope that I could
emulate some of these conventions in order to produce a recognised grime
video as in order for it to be it must possess at least a few conventional
aspects which can be found in other videos in the same genre. Also, by
viewing multiple videos in our genre we got a feel for the sort of locations
which are common in these sort of music videos which gave us much
needed inspiration to go out and find similar run down locations which
started the ball rolling within our group in respect to what we could shoot in
these places.

4. RESEARCH- WORDPRESS AND PREZI
Throughout our research stages we recorded all of our findings and also closely
analysed a few digipaks and music videos which were immediately placed on
our blog so that when we came to create our music video we could look back
and see the sort of things that we thought worked in music videos we had
seen previously and also maybe think about how we could include some
common conventions that we all agreed were successful in their respective
videos and debate which aspects we would like to include in our music
video. We documented all of our research and also, included all of our lyric
analysis which was completed after choosing our song, each member of our
group analysed the lyrics of the song in our own way and put all of our
interpretations of how we envisioned the music video to pan out then we had
a meeting and looked at everyone's ideas which was easy due to the layout
of everyone's initial ideas side by side so it was easy to breakdown and
compare the different scenarios people put down for each verse. We then
picked the lyric analysis and music video structure we thought we could
recreate best. WordPress also allowed me to create a slide show of my
Digipak research findings which displayed them in a much more interesting
and interactive way. We also used other platforms allowing us to express our
work and research in other ways such as Prezi and SlideShare.

5. PRODUCTION- HARDWARE
To capture our production we used a variety of different cameras allowing us to
be more creative and capture shots that we wouldn’t have been able to
attempt had we not had a variety of cameras to choose from. First of all we
had a smartphone which had underwater filming capabilities this allowed us
to capture a very unique and artistic shot which improves our shot diversity,
but without making it look like we had forced it in to the scene, it is
integrated in well and also contributes to our story line. We also had access
to a GoPro which allowed us to get some nice low angled shots due to the
small size of the camera and we also used the fish eye function when taking
pictures for our Digipak which created some sharp pictures and also some
out of focus background pictures allowing us to recreate some of the images
we had seen when researching other digipaks. As well as allowing us to
capture shots for our digipak it was also robust enough for us to get some
high angle shots in trees and precarious positions of our boxer training ,
which added diversity and kept the music video interesting with multiple
switches of angles capturing the same clip. Furthermore we had a canon
video recorder which allowed us to film in high definition making our whole
production look more professional and of a higher quality also the camera
allowed us to stabilise clips which helped dramatically when filming action
shots. The Canon also allowed us to get some establishing shots of each
different location that we filmed at and also had the additional feature of a
time lapse which helped create a wider shot variety within our music video.
Filming devices we used

6. PRODUCTION- SOFTWARE
We used final cut on an apple mac computer to edit our footage for our music
video. This was used to extract files from imports from all of our capturing
devices extremely easily. The editing side of this software allowed us to be
very creative with creating our music video as it allowed us to be daring with
our editing, due to it allowing us to try some interesting and complicated
cuts and changes. Firstly, this allowed us to add a black and white effect on
some of our clips, which made some of our clips look more eerie and dingy
which is hard to create when the clip is bright and colourful so I believe this
helped make our music recognisable to the grimy genre we were aspiring to.
Another creative feature that were able to include due to the software
capabilities was to use ‘masking’ which allows you to overlay three clips in 1
creating a time-lapse sort of affect of the same clip but with your actor in
different positions, this added more diversity to our editing and made it look
a lot more professional as we tried to stay away from basic editing skills due
to wanting to make it look much more of a professional product. We also
experimented with the huge variety of cuts that final cut had on offer which
kept our video quirky and moved some clips on seamlessly and others more
creatively. In order to overlay our song over the clips we had to import it
from royalty free music into final cut then placed it onto our timeline and
then edited clips over the top.

7. PRODUCTION-PHOTOSHOP
After capturing our images for our Digipak and deciding which of the
images were most suitable in summarising the content of the CD. We
then used Photoshop to edit the images. We used some features to edit
the image such as cropping our 2 actors out and deleting the
background then added another background in as a layer which
changed the actors location to a place much more recognisable in a
grime or rap photo. Furthermore we used the blur tool which completely
distorted the background leaving more focus on our actors and the
props that we had in the forefront of our image. We then used a website
called cool text to create a font which incorporated the grimy nature of
our images and lyrics which we used for the song title on our front page
of our digipak, we also kept the consistency of the typography
throughout our digipak so that we could help build up a recognisable
brand, as people will be able to link the typography with the artist in the
future if we was to make anymore digipaks for the same artist.