Evaluation 4

4. how have you used new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

For the planning and Evaluation stages, blogger was used to document as many of the stage as was physically possible, this enabled us to have a clear way of keeping on track for the project and to show us how far we had come and what else there was to do, we used youtube heavily for the research side, to look at different music videos to find the codes and conventions for the acoustic rock genre, then when we decided to use a green screen we looked at a lot of music videos that use similar technology and how effective it was for them.

Google in particular was fundamental to the making of the music video, firstly to research music videos and artists but also when we came across a new piece of technology we needed to learn how to use, google also gave us the opportunity to keep in contact with one another and if any work was done at home we could email it to each other for evaluation and email it to ourselves for easy data moving rather than a memory stick which could get lost or broken.

we used Windows Movie Maker to produce an animatic of our music video, we took pictures of our storyboard with a digital camera, uploaded them to a laptop and put them together against the song so we could get a rough idea of the flow and feeling of the video, so we could make any changes that would make it flow better.

we used play.com and next.com to research the clothes for the music video, play.com we used to research the t-shirt, as it is a popular site for t-shirts, it gave us a plethora of t-shirt to choose, and next we used for there wide choice of denim jeans, as they do designs like slim fit, boot fit, and worn, we used facebook to get feedback from friends and to keep in contact with each other.

For the filming of the video we used a panasonic SDR-S26 video camera with a HD SD card, before we started filming i took the camera home, and researched online all the features of the camera, so i knew how to use it and did several different screen test, to test the capabilities of the camera, to see what the best light to use was and how it reacted to fast movement and other factors, and to make sure i knew how the tripod worked, i also did several screen tests against a green screen to ensure that it was possible to use this camera with a green screen, when it came to using Adobe Premier elements 9 i approached it again with this mentallity making sure i knew it inside and out before editing, learning how to use the green screen key, especially the threshold and cutoff, and the eight point garbage matte and the old film, especially when it came to the last picture, where i increased the damage and colour sepia black & white, so the last picture appears to break down like in old films, i again approached photoshop in the same way, learning about the different layers, and how to lay the bullets out into a convincing 3d image of the peace symbol, all of this was new to us so we had to make sure we knew how it worked before we even attempted to make a video, so we could know the limits of the technology and then to try and push it further.

Throughout the production of our media products we were using digital cameras in recces and to document our progress, memory stick to back up our work incase something went wrong with the laptop, so we could simply move to a different laptop and continue, and mp3's to record the song and ipods to listen to the music and play it through speakers so the lip syncing would be convincing.