A.S.A. Productions: Evaluation Question 4

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

Many types of new technologies have been used in the research, designing, creating and development our music video, digipak, magazine cover etc.

As a group we decided on the artist and song, which we were going to create our music video for, when we had chosen the song we individually researched the artist and genre to gain an improved knowledge on what we was working with. Therefore I used Google to find websites to research about the song, genre and the artist, this allowed me to find and use sites such as Wikipedia, which gave me plenty of information, which I needed.

YouTube was another website which helped us as a group to create and develop ideas and research for our music video. The use of YouTube allowed us to get ideas on styles of music video from the Grime genre to give us an idea of how we wanted our video to look and whether it would be a Narrative/Conceptual/Performance music video. Also we watched music videos to give us inspiration on Mise-En-Scene, Camera Shots, Locations etc. when I found inspiring music videos I posted them on our group blog by copying and pasting the embedding code into a post on the blog, which was then followed by a short description of the video and why it has been an inspiration to us.

Blogger has helped us share our work with each other by being able to post images, videos and essays onto the blog. Therefore we can all view our work as a group and share ideas and inspirational material, which we have found.
In the process of research we gathered together ideas of elements of the video such as mise-en-scene, and a list of shot types and angles and we drew up a timeline of a rough idea of our music. The presentation was then presented to an audience to give them our idea and a feel of what our proposed music video was going to be like.

To present my evaluation of our group music video and digipak I have used Wix.com which is a website that has enabled to create my own website based around our music video and the artist, on my website I was able to present my evaluation by posting on the site with each question on its own individual page. Other than the evaluation I have put images of the artist on the website with some information about on the artist. I was able to upload music, images and essays onto my website through the editing applications on the Wix website, which I found very simple to use and had an easy to use layout.

To create the music video we have used a Digital HD Camcorder which enhanced the appearance of the music video overall as it is of a high quality being recorded in High Definition. Another camera we used was my Nikon D1 Digital SLR camera to get locations shots, which we have used for some of the images on our Digipak and magazine advert. Using this Digital SLR camera had given us high quality images, which also improved the appearance of the Digipak and magazine advert as of the high quality. When shooting most of the shots in the video and taking photos we used a tripod for both cameras as it gave us steady and well positioned shots to give a professional look to the video and images.

To edit the video footage we used Apple’s Final Cut Express as it enabled us to make many different edits and effects to our music video. Before editing our music video footage we practiced video editing by filming a short performance music video and then edited it making many different cuts and using a variety of shots from close ups to long shots. This practice preliminary sequence helped us by giving us an idea on how to edit music videos and how to match the video to the music and lyrics.

Editing the photos used for our digipak and magazine advert we used Adobe Photoshop, which I found fairly simple to use as the layout of the software mainframe was clear and organised. There were some difficulties in editing such as cutting parts of an image and copying it to another but this was resolved with some advice and help. We used a range of effects on our images to create an improved and professional appearance to our Digipak and Magazine Advert whilst holding the same theme throughout.

To make a final decision on our digipak and magazine advert we had to edit many photos using Photoshop to get ideas and to experiment with different styles to then gain further knowledge in using Photoshop as well as finding key elements which we wish to use in our digipak and magazine advert.

As our editing skills progressed our edited images had become to look more professional therefore after so many edits of all different images we together chose our favourite images and edit versions to use in our digipak.