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

2. Research
The first stage was conducting research to inform us about forms and
conventions of music videos from certain genres, and to influence us on our
own idea.
We began by researching into different genres, discovering the codes and
conventions of each genre and analysing music videos from these genres.
We then compared professional music videos to amateur ones to see how they
differ from one another and what we could do to make us look as professional
as possible.
The final part to our research stage was researching music videos from our
chosen genre, which was pop/rock. We analysed music videos from this genre
and as a result this influenced what techniques we used within our product.

3. Planning
For the planning stage, we came up with a basic idea, influenced by our
previous research. We thought of the conventions we would need to
include and this contributed to the creation of our idea. We also thought
about what shots we would need to use, along with settings. We then
wrote our original idea down and created a storyboard giving us a rough
guideline as to how we will be structuring our music video. Our
storyboards were much shorter than they were for our practical work last
year, and we thought it was harder to think of every shot we would use as
we continued to adapt and change our idea, so we just used this as a
guide showing us when we will have shots of our narrative, where the
band shots would fit in, and what shots we may want to use that regularly
feature in pop/rock videos.

4. Here, we have a short discussion of our research and planning
stage with two of our group members, Maisie and Lisa.

5. Construction
For this stage we first had to film our music video. We began by using a
Sony camera which saves footage on a small disc. However, after
filming, we tried to upload the footage onto our computer, but there was
a 'disc error' preventing us from uploading it.
This camera was fairly complicated to use compared to others, and
rather time consuming as we had to format the disc, then finalise the
footage after filming. We believe this is where the disc error may have
occurred from if one of these processes was not done correctly.
When we re-filmed we used a more updated, Cannon camera. We believe
this camera had a better filming quality and was easier and quicker to
use. Especially as the footage was saved onto a memory card, so all we
had to do was insert the card and save the shots onto our computer.

6. After filming, we had to upload all of our footage onto the computer
and begin the editing process.
We started this on a program called 'Corel', however, this program
hasn't been very good for us in the past as it kept freezing and
shutting down before giving us a chance to save our work. It began
freezing when we started using it and the tools were quite limited on it,
so we decided to start again on a newer, more complex editing
program, Adobe Premiere Pro.
We were able to show a wider skill range through using Premiere Pro
as we could do a lot more to our music video and add many effects
onto our video to make it look more professional , such as lighting
effects used on the band shots, and a 'ghosting' effect on our final
shot to help represent frustration and blend the final two shots
together better.

7. Here, we have a Maisie and Lisa again, showing the technology
we used and discussing why we used them.

8. Ancillary Tasks
For the ancillary tasks (digipak and poster) we used inspiration from
real media products of which we researched and analysed from the
same or similar genres. We used Adobe Photoshop to create these
too, which took a few attempts to get them right. Amber and Maisie
were the two main people working on the ancillary tasks with input
from the rest of the group. We worked together to chose images, fonts
and photos to use on these products and all of which are original
artwork.
We used Photoshop as this program has many tools and effects on it
for us to make our ancillary tasks look as professional as possible. We
have uploaded various drafts of our ancillary tasks onto our blog to
track and show our progress as we further our skills and knowledge.

9. Some of us had not used Photoshop before, so it was all new to us but we
learnt how to use the basic tools while leaving the more advanced tasks
to those more experienced with the program. We also had to find the
correct measurements for our digipak so that it would fit correctly into
our CD case, and resize all of our images.
In the following video our use of Photoshop is discussed further:

10. Evaluation
This all resulted in us increasing our skills and knowledge with
various, and new, technologies. We can now use this knowledge
within our evaluation by showing our film making and editing skills,
along with our increased knowledge. The use of the new technology
has increased the quality of our evaluations, as the new Cannon
cameras are a lot less time consuming, due to the fact that all
footage is either, saved to the camera or to a memory card, whereas
the old Sony cameras used discs which had to be formatted and
finalised, which took up a lot of time. Also as they were older, we
encountered more problems with them.