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

During the research stage of our production we used YouTube in order to search for grime artists making it possible for us to view their music videos and capture an idea of what grime music videos generally consist of. 

We also browsed through Myspace, Facebook and Wikipedia in search of Grime artists and its genre so that we could better understand its origins, audiences and background. Throughout our whole media project we used a website called Blogger to post our work allowing us to track our own progress. We had no trouble using Blogger since we were taught how to use it in our previous year during AS media and so we were able to post each individual piece of work displaying everything he had thus done so far. We also used Wix, a website creator, in which we made websites in order to display our projects and evaluation answers. I had trouble using Wix at first as I had never used this type of software and found it difficult to upload video’s or create menus.

Part of our planning included the video-editing software Final Cut Express, which we used to create an animatic version of our hand drawn storyboard. We created this by taking pictures of our story board using a Nikon D40 digital stills camera and then uploading the photos onto Final Cut Express. This task proved to be relatively easy as we had previously used the Final Cut Express software in AS Media.

We also used Adobe Photoshop CS4, the photo editing software, which allowed us to create our album artwork and magazine adverts. Photoshop took a while to get used to considering we hadn’t had the need to use it in AS. We were having slight problems adjusting the font on our magazine advert to suit the grime genre. However, after some research we discovered fonts could be downloaded into Photoshop allowing us to find the perfect font to use in our magazine advert.

After filming the scenes we needed for our music video on a JVC High Definition camera, we uploaded the footage onto Final Cut to edit. Live Type was used to create our production brand logo while the sound playing over the animation was created on Garage Band. In order to create jump cuts the star of our music video was filmed with a fixed camera in three different locations and then layered on top of each other. To create the stop motion sequence within our music video, over 100 images were taken on an SLR camera and then uploaded to Final Cut to create a moving sequence. Aspects of real album covers and magazine advertisement material were introduced to our product with the use of critic quotes from other magazines such as ‘Mojo’ as well as ‘explicit content’ warnings on the cover of our album. 

http://www.wix.com/asaproduction1/aromalo