This is my question 4 answer to A2 media studies G324 evaluation. This is only the written version however and I should upload a video version of this within the next few weeks.

1. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research planning
and evaluation stages?
To complete this project I used an iMac, which ran on OS X 10.9.4. The Mac was
an integral part of this project and provided an easy interface to work with. The
Mac had the dock at the bottom of the screen. In it was the web browsers that I
would use, Fire Fox and more predominantly so, Google Chrome. The other’s I
will get to later. What the mac allowed me to do was use the cmd- shift-3
command to take entire screen shots and cmd-shift-4 to take a snap shot of a
particular area, which proved to be infallible in contributing to completing tasks
quickly.
So at the beginning of my project I had to look up some images to edit so that I
would get used to the software. This software was Photoshop, Photoshop is an
adobe product which allows the user to edit, in multiple layers, add effects, and
render images on top of numerous other ways. Photoshop was one of the
pinnacle tools I used over the project and allowed me to complete my ancillary
tasks, the magazine advert and the digipack. I got used to this software by doing
experimentation tasks, testing my Photoshop skills from tutorials found on
Pintrest (Which I will go into detail about later). I learned techniques such as
selective colouring, ghosting effects and many more, which I utilized in my final
product.
I got the images off of Google images where I numerous images by using the
special search engine which allowed me to search for certain pictures and
colours of my choice.
One I had edited the pictures I uploaded them to Blogger account, my hub where
I uploaded and organised my work. I constantly kept it updated with my weekly
work and organised, they ore organised chronologically to show the
advancement of the project it into several categories:
“Home, Experimentation, Research, Planning, Construction, Final Product
Evaluation, Formative Feedback and Application Of Theory”
This allowed me to pace myself and complete so many asks without it seeming
overwhelming. They ore organised chronologically to show the advancement of
the project. The template I used was one of the dynamic views, which presents
the Blog page in a finer fashion in comparison to the “Simple” or “Awesome. Inc.”
Templates.
During this time I did my test footage, which was a lip sync task. I used my
iPhones “Music” to use the chosen song “Teenage Dirt bag”, which I downloaded
from and album on iTunes. We recorded it on a Panasonic camcorder with a
32gbt memory card. Once recorded I recorded it I brought it back to the mac and
used the program Final Cut Pro edit the clips together. Afterwards I uploaded it

2. to the Boxedkat YouTube channel. I gave a brief description of the video and put
it under the education category so that it would be taken down if any music
copyrights occurred.
After the experiment section I moved onto the research stage of the project. I
looked into artists of real life media texts by looking through magazines such as
Rolling Stones and Rock Sound. For the Magazine analysis I used the Marina
and the Diamonds “ Shampain” and the Green Day “Wake Me Up When
September End’s” advert, both which I took into huge consideration when
creating my own product. They both highlight simplicity with very basic photos
however they editing of the images has made the products stand out, with that in
mind I incorporated that style for my own Advert. I was able to do this due to a
feature on the mac, which allows me to drag an image from the search engine
and drop in onto my desktop or folder instantly. I did this using the program
Microsoft Word a fairly basic program, which allowed me to upload images and
write documents.
Using the search engine Google and using the quotation mark: Which forces
inclusion of a word or a phrase, the word being “Digipack”. I used this to find the
Green Day “International Super-hits” and Lana Del Rays “Born To Die”
Digipack. They were both 6 sided like how I would do mine. I analysed
everything then uploaded the analysed products to a website called Slide Share.
Slide share allowed me to upload my documents to the Internet where upon they
could be embedded into a post on the Blogger page.
The next tasks I moved onto were the music video analysis tasks. I reviewed 3
music videos from the video-streaming site YouTube. I searched for music videos
that I thought were interesting from a narrative or presentation perspective and
analysed them, and uploaded them to Slide share then my Blog.
For the Detailed frame analysis I used the presentational website Prezi, this
website enabled me to exiting power points far superior to the likes of Microsoft
PowerPoint. Due to it’s easy accessibility and ease of use. It allowed me to
instantly import images, videos and music instantly from either the Internet or
my own computer.
Other Websites I used included Pintrest. Pintrest is a website that allows you to
pin, being the operative word, pictures to your pegboards. Each Board may
relate to a theme that you create out of images you find yourself. I used mu
Pintrest to look art female artist, for the reason to gain a compendium of idea,
which I could transform, to an artist that would appeal to my artist. The simple
and easy user interface made it easy to add to my pin-board and retrieve images
for comparison. I further found out about artists though websites such as
Wikipedia where I gathered information about the genre their styles and what
they represent
When I was designing my Record Label, when looking through the fonts that
Microsoft offered I didn’t find any that would have represented what I was trying
to go for in my record label. I wanted something that would show that this

3. record label supported alternative music. So I opted to search the Internet where
I came across the website known as DaFont.com. This website offered thousands
of user created fonts each separated into different category depending on the
appearance of the font. The one I chose was the SHUT EM’ DOWN font which I
felt escalates the alternative music theme when compared to one found in the
industry like XL recording’s and Mom+Pop. I also used this website to use the
font used throughout my ancillary tasks which was the font known as DPQuake.
Once I downloaded them I went to my download’s file and opened the ttf file
which cause the program Fontbook to open that imported the font to all of the
font selections of my mac, while also doing a security check.
I also used the original artists own website, @ http://www.digital-
daggers.com/ to contact them for permission to use the song through their
contact page which offered a way of e-mailing them.
For my audience research task I used a pair Panasonic camcorders to record
my focus group to recall feedback from them. I had to do this twice however as
the first time they didn’t record as their was a problem with the settings as they
were set on economy mode which caused the camera’s to stop recording after
about 15 seconds. So the second time I did it I made sure that they were on the
correct settings. When I initially made the video on final cut it was too large of a
file for YouTube, so I went to daily motion however I found the same problem
with file size, so I opted to go back and spilt them into two different videos.
For further audience research I created a Google Docx questionnaire, which
centred around what people wanted in a music video how who they rated the
importance of each aspect. I sent this out through Twitter and the collages e-
mail to students who did media and film so that they would understand the
context of the questions. Once I had the results I compiled them into a Prezi
concluding the results of each question and then a final conclusion.
To acquire my artist I used Facebook, E-mail and Prezi to find someone to be
my artist. I got a response and we kept in touch via phone, text and snap chat to
get information off each other and gain awareness of what would be going on
during the shooting of the music video.
I used websites such as next and River Island to find the type of outfit I thought
would express the correct emotions in the music video. Though some
alternations did occur during the actual filming. These clothes shops showed me
what was currently in fashion and I built my artist around this modern image.
I downloaded the song through iTunes and then I had access to the song and was
able to drag the song from the music folder in Final Cut Pro into the storyline
(also known as timeline).
I drew my own storyboards on A3 paper and then took them to my college’s
scanner a canon CLC4040where I scanned them into my computer. I chose to
scan them in as it created a much crisper image and allows images to be easily
identified.

4. Final cut was used again where I used artificial panning and tilting through the
use of key frames and the transformation tools in final cut pro. They helped
emphasize and elaborate what I wanted to do in my actual music video.
Google maps was used to find the locations where I would be filming and gave
me an awareness of how far the distance was to the beach so I could organize my
time management for my call sheet. I was used for its easy interface and its
ability to give a first person perspective of the area you want to look at.
I used a Cannon DSLR 600D, I chose this camera, as it was the best one the
collage had for shooting. It recorded in 1080p and I wanted this high quality in
my own product, hence why I chose it, to record my first shoot. I also used a
crane which I used to get the high angle shots and the tilt at the beginning of my
music video and used a combination of handheld and tripod to do the other
shots with. Regrettably allot of the footage was grainy and unusable, so a week
later I arranged to do another shoot however I was given a Panasonic HVC
camcorder, I had to use this as the DSLR was booked out by other students. But
this created a lot of problems for me; this time the problem was that whenever
the camcorder was turned off all of the footage would delete itself.
I ended up getting myself my own camera, which was a Cannon DSLR 70D I
chose this as I recorded in 1080p and I felt was a good future investment for
photography and media. It recorded at an extremely high quality and I uploaded
the footage to final cut.
I also used the DSLR to take the photos for my digipack and magazine advert. I
then uploaded them to Instagram at my home computer so that they could be
accessed at collage. I dragged them into my desktop and used iPhoto to organize
the photos while they were downloading and allowed me to chose the selective
area of the photo’s that I wanted to keep, getting rid of the access space.
Final cut pro was used to manifest my footage into a music video. This software
was chosen of iMovie as iMovie is very limited in the special editing techniques
it offers where as Final Cut Pro offers a plethora of different techniques which I
took liberties with. I was able to separate the video and sound also known as
mp4 and wav.file clips and deleted the audio leaving just the footage aside from
in one scene where Mortal drops a pebble into the pond.
I used allot of effects in this music video, one of the most notable was the
“Cartoon” effect. I found this effect under the Stylize category, which gave my
music video a unique look to it. In selective scenes, which are the flash back
scenes I used the effect under the category of “Looks” which I placed over the
Romantic filter which gave off an almost dream like appearance without being
too noticeable. I also altered a few of the shot’s hue/saturation to clear up the
images. I also utilised the enhancements menu that I used to sort of the lighting
and colour in a few of the scenes where the colour balance was off due to
shadows or poor lighting.

5. I used transitions such as bloom to end the music video as it appears as though
the moment we see is fleeting but their story isn’t finished. Other tools that I
used was how I could zoom in on a clip to only show a selective part of the shot
through the use of the crop tool. The soft were also enabled be to alter the time
dilation of my video, enabling me to slow up, slow down and even reverse the
clip allowing me create an almost dream like state throughout the film, as though
the artist is floating throughout the narrative.
When it came to creating the evaluation I started off by creating a Wix website,
which is a free website creator with lots of flexibility to creating a website of my
own design. I am able to access my web pages easily and import video, image and
sound to my website and keep it in theme with my ancillary tasks.
To record my actions on the mac to show in this presentation I used the
QuickTime player application, and used the record feature it offed to record the
footage demonstrating the websites and the functions.
That’s my Question 4 question wrapped up then. Thanks for watching.