1. How did you use new media technologies in the construction
and research, planning and evaluation stages?
EVALUATION QUESTION 4.
2. • The bloggie cameras (Sony Bloggie)
• Tripod
• Final Cut Pro
• MPEG Stream clip
• ITunes
• Photoshop
• Paint (While I drafted my Digipak)
• BlogSpot
• Fog machine (We intended to use the fog machine during the bridge of the
song however it was cut out of the video)
TECHNOLOGIES USED THROUGHOUT
OUR ENTIRE PRODUCTION
3. The Sony Bloggie (also known as Ralph) is the camera we used to film our
entire production. Everything from the Preliminary tasks to filming our final
project to taking the pictures for our Ancillary tasks. Admittedly this is the
same camera we used last year to film ‘Esther’ so it can be argued that the
camera is quite old however all the shots (in my opinion) are of a high quality
and there is no blurriness that I can detect in any of the shots. We’re very
happy with how the shots have turned out, especially the crane shots that we
took that unfortunately didn’t make it into the video but are screen capped
below. The significance of Ralph cannot be overstepped because if it wasn’t
for him we wouldn’t have been able to film outside of school as it is a known
fact that if you use the HD school cameras you cannot take them from school
premises. So thank you very much Ralph.
SONY BLOGGIE (RALPH)
Filming outside
all thanks to
Ralph!
A picture
of a Sony
Bloggie.
(Not
Ralph)
4. The Tripod (also now known as Mercutio because where would Romeo a.k.a
Ralph be without Mercutio? Okay bad example.) was used during many of the
sequences in our music video. More frequently during the
performance/greenery shots that we took later. The Tripod became very
important to our production because (for reasons of practicality) Sarah and I
took it upon ourselves to be in the band and for shots of the three of us
together we soon stumbled upon an issue. How can we be in a shot together
when one of us needs to film? Now one of the obvious resolutions was for us
to enroll the help of a fellow Media student (Jess) and we did during the reveal
scene but this soon became a problem in itself because Jess had her own
project to film and less time to put towards helping us. So we were allowed to
borrow Mercutio (the school’s tripod) and his involvement was shown in many
of the shots below.
TRIPOD (MERCUTIO)
Sarah, Livvy and I. Shots like these
provided us with many problems...
5. By now I don’t think it needs to be explained how important ‘Final Cut Pro’ is
to our production. This is the computer program that enabled us to edit
together all of our clips, overlay filters and essentially create the music video.
This is a program only featured on Macs. This program played a role in all of
our tasks – Ancillary, Preliminary and Final. This year the filters we have used
are color correction on the shots screen capped below and dip-to-color
transitions. Another example of how helpful Final Cut Pro has been is during
editing our 1st evaluation question. It allowed me to edit together the clips so
that we could demonstrate the points we were making with examples from
other music videos etc.
FINAL CUT PRO
The phone sequence
was edited using Final
Cut Pro. We owe it all
to FCP.
6. MPEG Stream Clip is an entirely new technology for us this year. MPEG
Stream Clip is a program (much like Final Cut Pro) featured only on Macs that
can transform the format of your clips from MP4 to .Mov which Final Cut
Pro prefers. It can also change from .Mov to other formats although I haven’t
actually tested them as I didn’t want to cause a ‘general error’ on Final Cut
Pro. We owe a lot of our production to this program because if it hadn’t been
for this program we would not have been able to edit. During our first months
of editing we experienced our first ever ‘general error’ on Final Cut Pro which
means that we could not continue editing because there was something wrong
with either the clips or Final Cut Pro. After having the technicians come down
to try and diagnose the problem we realized that the problem was not the Mac
itself but our clips. They were in a format which Final Cut Pro didn’t approve
of. So after searching endlessly for a program to help us we found MPEG
Stream Clip and we couldn’t be more grateful.
MPEG STREAM CLIP
THE ONLY ERROR IS YOU FINAL
CUT PRO. D: NOT ME.
7. ITunes (which you probably already know) is an apple program that
downloads music onto IPods for a reasonable charge (I say reasonable because
I don’t want to start a fight with the Apple company. They’re much bigger
than I am.) This was the program we used to download our track ‘Black Heart’
by Stooshe onto the Mac in order for us to use it in the music video. This was
also down to Stooshe giving us permission to use the song. So yay.
From Itunes we then uploaded the track onto our Final Cut Pro timeline and
spent countless amounts of hours carefully pinpointing the seconds in the
song in which the singing starts so that our lip syncing was to perfection.
ITUNES
This is the
ITunes logo!
This is the
ITunes library!
8. Photoshop became another key element in the completion of my coursework
and though it was only used for the Ancillary tasks it played a very important
part. Photoshop was the sole program I used to complete my Digipak and my
Marketing Campaign. Through use of tools on Photoshop such as the cookie
cutter tool, colour correction and tie-dye colour mergence I was able to create
all 6 pages of my Digipak to fit in with my theme and to fit the conventions
of similar media products within the same genre. Below is the finished
product of my Digipak.
PHOTOSHOP
My final draft of ‘Villains’ marketing
campaign.
9. As I don’t have Photoshop on my computer at home I had to come up with
an alternative programme to use while drafting ideas for my
Digipak/Marketing Campaign but the question was how? I hadn’t taken any
original photography yet and I had no professional programs on my computer.
On the other hand I did have many ideas I wanted to try and an old computer
with the classic program ‘Paint’. Here are some examples of tools I used on
paint:
• Background colouring
•Copy/Paste
•Free crop
And scattered around the page are some of the drafts I made during pre-
production.
PAINT
I could only find one of my Paint drafts though I am sure I did 3. This was my first
ever draft on Paint. As you can tell I hadn’t given much thought to the conventions of
Pop otherwise it would be a lot brighter!
A picture that I considered using due to the fact that we’re
all in costume and this would have given my Digipak a
youthful approach.
Can’t find
the whole
shot!
10. As you probably already know (seeing as you are currently on my blog or i’d
hope you were) blogspot is an online blogging platform which has enabled me
to upload all of my coursework to the internet for yours truly. Blogspot has
recorded all of my research and data, been a place where I could store all of
my work and a way for me to communicate with my teacher outside of lessons
if I need help. Blogspot is the most important technology I have learned to
use during these past two years for various reasons but mostly because of how
much simpler it made time tabling our film schedules. So thank you Blogspot.
BLOGSPOT
Here is a screen
shot of my AS
blog!
Here is a screen
shot of my A2
blog!
Page views for both blogs!
11. Sarah and I had discussed (in quite a lot of detail) our intention to use the Fog
machine during the bridge of the song (‘He got a black heart. He’s got such a
dirty black heart in here. Innit girls?’) but unfortunately (after experimenting
with this very fascinating device in class) we soon discovered that the fog
seems to cloud the shot entirely and choke all those in the room with it till
they turn blue. This was not a look we wanted our actors to have and
therefore we had to make the decision not to use it. We did experiment with
the kinds of shots we would use though (including a 360 shot of all three of
us) and had made plans to use it until that debacle happened. Oh well.
THE FOG MACHINE
