How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? A2 Media Studies

1. QUESTION 4
How did you use media
technologies in the construction
and research, planning and
evaluation stages?

2. What we used to film.
 To film our documentary, we used Sony HXR-MC200E cameras.
These cameras are broadcast standard. We equipped ourselves with
three of these cameras to film different viewpoints of the subject –
this being the performers.
 Other equipment we used to film along side the camera was a
Manfrotto tripod. We used this to film the interviews and we used one
for the camera that was situated on stage. We was not allowed to
use the tripods for the cameras behind the barrier (in front of the
audience) for safety precautions. We all had headphones for each
camera to make sure the camera and microphone was fully
functioning when it came to recording the sound.
 When we as filming the concerts we used a boom microphone as it
picks up all sound. The clip microphone was used when we recorded
the interviews and when we recorded both narration for the
documentary and radio advertisement.

3. The computer system
 The computer system we used to create our
documentary was a XPS Dell PC with a solid-state
hard drive. We used a USB cable when transferring
our video footage across to the computer. We did the
main documentary, radio advert and newspaper
advert on one computer and uploaded all our work
onto the D Drive in a folder called „Rolex‟
 However, we used different computers to do solo
research and to complete our blogs this included
writing up the formal proposal, audience feedback ect.
 Once we had come to a decision on the chosen topic
(live music) we needed to find out what our target
audience would like to see featured in a documentary
specifically designed around music. Using Microsoft
word we created a questionnaire that we then
distributed to our potential audience so we could get
feedback. Once we pulled all of the results together
we used Microsoft Excel to discriminate our results in
the form of graphs.

4. Adobe Premiere Pro C55
 Once we had all the footage for our documentary we started
to create it. To do this we used Adobe Premiere Pro C55.
Adobe Premiere was a relatively new software to me so using
this media technology was a learning process.
 We created a „New Sequence‟ and altered the settings to
AVCHD 1080p, HD. We then imported all the footage onto
the resourced list.
 Once we had done this we set the sequence marker to
00:05:00 so we did not go over the maximum time limit.
 We made a start my importing the sound bed and altering the
sound quality.
 For our documentary the main tool we used to edit the
footage was the 'razor' tool which splits the footage you have
selected into two parts. This was extremely useful when
creating our montage of gig footage and when we wanted to
cut footage that didn‟t look how we wanted it to or we just
didn‟t want to include it in our documentary.
 For the start of our documentary we altered the speed of the
footage by using the selection tool and raising the yellow line.

5. Adobe Premiere Pro C55
 Cross Dissolve- We used the
transformation „Cross Dissolve‟ to make
the documentary seem more artistic and
to give it a sense of quirkiness .
 The delink tool was very useful as it
unlinked the selected clip so the audio
was separated from the video footage.
This allowed us to move the footage
around while the audio stayed in its
original position and also allowed us to
delete unused sound.
 We used chroma key to delete the green
screen around a image. The image we
selected for this was a 'Rec' camera
symbol. We chose to add this over the
video of the queue going into the venue.
 We used an effect called „Fill Left‟ to
make the sound level so it became
stereo instead of it being imbalanced and
coming our of one headphone. This
helped make our documentary sound
more professional.

6. Adobe Premiere Pro C55
 We used transitions to make the transfer from clip to clip smoother and to make the
documentary more continuous. Some of the transitions we used was „Dip to Black‟ and „Dither
Dissolve‟ These transitions were quick and effective and gave the documentary more edge.
They also made the documentary seem more dynamic in a way.
 We used Title>New Title>Default Still and created our title for our documentary. We chose the font,
„Dirty Ego‟ because it was quirky and fit within the theme of our documentary.
 We used a transition called „Cross Zoom‟ on a clip featuring someone buying on Ticketmaster
because it was an interesting and artistic was of transferring from the clip to the information about
how Ticketmaster is one of the „leading ticket sales companies worldwide‟.

7. Adobe Photoshop CS5
 To create the newspaper advertisement and to edit the graphic we used Adobe Photoshop
CS5 and exported them into Bitmap (advert) and PNG (Graphic) files.
 We used Adobe Photoshop to create the newspaper advertisement and to edit the graphic for
our documentary. When exporting the advert we changed the file type to Bitmap because it is
a better quality than jpg files. We also exported the graphic in a Adobe Firework PNG file so it
could be used in Premiere with ought a background.
 Some of the editing tools we used in Photoshop to create the advertisement are as followed;
 Magic wand tool- We used this to eliminate the background around the MTV logo. This was
useful also in making our poster look professional and also was helpful when editing the
Graphic for our actual documentary.
 Polygonal Lasso- This tool was used to give the subject in the photograph more of an outline.
This gave the photograph more emphasis as it stands out more. This tool was also used to
eliminate the sections we did not want on the graphic.
 Overlay tool- For our newspaper advertisement we exported two stills from our footage and
applied overlay to them. This made it so you could see the background image merged into the
foreground image.
 Fill Bucket- We copied the colour of the text and filed sections of the MTV logo so there was a
sense of continuity and professionalism.
 Text Tool- We used the text tool to create the title and tagline. The title also had this sense of
continuity as we used the same font (Dirty Ego) that we used in the documentary and the
same tagline as the one in the radio advert.

8. Research
 We used internet Explore to do all of our research
for our media products.
 For our documentary we first started to research
potential performers to include in our
documentary. We typed in the selected artists
name on Google search engine along with either
„management‟ or „manager.‟ Websites such as
Manchester Academy and Liverpool O2 Academy
were useful informing us of the bands performing
locally.
Our secondary research was mainly YouTube based. The Archive footage we used was all of live concerts from various
bands. (30 Seconds to Mars, Paramore, Foster the People, and The Kooks.) Were extracted clips from YouTube videos
to add more variety to our montage at the beginning and middle of our documentary. Mozilla Firefox featured a very
usual plug-in called „YouTube Downloader‟ that allowed us to download these clips. Once you are on the selected video
you could click on the newly added drop-down box and select download. This allowed us to not only extract archive
footage but also relevant sound-beds such as Too Close by Alex Clare and 'Artbreaker by Kids in Glasshouses.

9. Contacting the Managers.
“Dear Sir/Madam,
We are writing from the Media and Film department at
Priestley College. We are a team of 2nd year students who  Because we wanted our documentary to look as
have recently acquired a bank of high definition broadcast professional as possible we used Windows Hotmail
standard solid state video cameras. We have been and Outlook to email the managers. We drafted a
commissioned to produce a documentary based on „The Gig formal proposal to send to the managers after
Experience‟ and will feature a wealth of „Indie Rock‟ talent. searching for the manager‟s email addresses.
We would like to propose that we will film your event in
 We then sent them a film brief via email.
1080p with a multi camera set up for free.
Within our proposed agreement we would offer exclusive
rights to yourselves to the footage filmed at the Imagine
Dragons concert in Manchester on Friday 16 November
2012. All we would request in exchange would be a 5 minute
interview with the band before or after the gig. We are a team of 2nd year students who have recently
I understand we are working against time and your speedy acquired a bank of high definition broadcast standard solid
response would be much appreciated. state video cameras and we would like to propose that we will
Yours sincerely, film your event in 1080p with a multi camera set up for free.
NED Productions.” The camera set up will include three cameras – one roaming
on stage and two static at fixed points within the venue.
We will not be using this footage commercially or for profit. It
will be used for an internal college assessment only. We have
 The manager to Imagine Dragons replied with a already filmed similar events and have received positive
contract that their lawyers had created. They sent me feedback so far.
this in a PDF file which I then had to sign. In return for all of the raw footage, we would like access to the
band for a five minute interview to ask some generic
questions for our documentary. This could take place before
or after the gig.
We would like to thank you again for this opportunity and we
guarantee you will be happy with what we provide for you.

10. Blogging.
 We agreed that the default fonts on Adobe Premiere weren't quite what we was looking for so we searched through a
website called Dafont to find the font that matched the theme of the documentary. Eventually we downloaded the font
'Dirty Ego.'
 We recorded all our data, the stages of the documentary, and any research we did onto a website called Blogger, an
online Blog-Publishing service with is hosted by Google. This helped keep our work together and to easily organised.
 We recorded multiple forms of media onto
the blog from embedded YouTube videos
featuring our finished work, Microsoft
PowerPoint presentations which we
embedded from SlideShare. Blogger was
an efficient way of recording all of your
date, however because it is open
completely to the public there is a chance
your work could be copied.