Evaluation Question 4 (By Voke, Emily, Sophie and Vicky)

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

The internet played an integral role in the research, planning and construction of everything. Before we could do anything, concrete research had to be undertaken by each of us in our group. There were various sources we used in the research of our music video. One of the first things we did was to search for our actual song that we would use. We used the internet website youtube.com, in search of our song choices. After using youtubes search engine, it came down to just two songs: 

1. Foals - Olympic Airways
2. Bloc Party - Flux

1.Foals - Olympic Airways

Click thumbnail to view music video ..

2.Bloc Party- Flux

Click thumbnail to view music video ..

After careful deliberation, it was decided that our group use Bloc Party -Flux. The final decision was down to our teacher Mrs Mcluckie who approved of us using this song. The research didn't stop there as we then had to watch several videos to pick out certain elements from these videos and find a way to emulate these elements into our own music video. The original video for Bloc Party -Flux didn't have any elements in its content that we felt we could extract. The reason we couldn't use anything from this video was because of the relationship between he lyrics and the visuals. 

Bloc Party's Music Video

The videos we researched were; 

1. Pixie Lott - All About Tonight
2. Rihanna - Russian Roulette 
3. Ellie Gouldings  - Lights 
4. Kanye West - All of the Lights 
5. The Script - The Man Who Couldn't be Moved

These videos all had there individual elements that we felt would work with our video. For example, both Pixie Lotts and Rihanna's videos gave us the ideas of overlays in our music video. Ellie Goulding's and Kanye West's video interested us  because of the strobe lighting aspect of it. We felt that this may be a unique aspect to our music video, as most other groups weren't thinking of incorporating this type of lighting in their own videos. Because our music video was performance and narrative, we had to sure our lip synching was in time with the lyrics of our song. We looked at The Script - The Man Who Couldn't be Moved, to research how the lip synching was used effectively. 

After researching into the elements for our music video, the ancillary task was the final and finished piece for our A2 coursework. Because we were looking at doing the posters for a magazine and album cover, we had to look at several examples of posters and album covers. After looking at several examples, we knew what things to emulate. For our poster, we looked at several posters including: 

1. Rihanna's Loud poster
2. Green Day's Wake Me up When September Ends 
3. Noah and the Whale
4. Jay-Z and Kanye West' Watch the Throne poster

All these posters gave us some sort of insight into what needs to be put into our own advert. The elements that we identified were as follows:

• The star ratings 
• Quotes from critics, newspapers and magazines
• Website for the band 
• Placing our album cover on the poster

All of the posters we analysed were found on a search engine named google.com. The images we found online gave us an outline of what we needed to do for our own poster. We also did the same for our album cover by looking online for images of Bloc Party's previous album covers and trying to identify some elements that we to could use. All of Bloc Party's images on the front cover of the album was that of scenery, except one. Another house style they had made use of was the same style font in all of their albums. When analysing these covers we felt it necessary to try and emulate there font. Using the online website Dafont.com, we looked for different fonts that were similar to that of Bloc Party's. The font that we as a group decided to use was 'Code', which like Bloc Party's signature  masthead came as a bold version which is perfect for our own album masthead. The font is a house style hat we want to keep in our digipak. 

Click thumbnail for Final Cut Pro Tutorial

As a group, we looked at tutorials on youtube when we needed to learn how certain things were done in the editing process of Final Cut Pro.  Some things we looked at was the split screen effect, whereby two images were placed side by side and moving simultaneously. Apart from this we all used our own initiative into the editing of editing of music video.

Facebook allowed our group to communicate and gain feedback from our target audience. In regards to communication, facebook, the social network website enabled us to plan when we were to meet up to begin filming and taking pictures. We communicated using the inbox tool on Facebook.

Facebook feedback

Facebook feedback

Facebook feedback

Cameras

On our very first day of filming in Camden Town, we used as proffessional camera that was borrowed from a friend on Sophie Jansen's. The camera was a "Canon 1234B002 Model EOS 30D (SRL)". The camera had a lot to offer with its stunning and awe-inspiring HD lens and great zooming ability. One downside with this camera that it was ver complex and complicated to us as it had very many functions. We had to use SD cards to save our filing which proved to be quite a challenege as the filming took up a lot of memory, as we inevitably ended up using 6 memory cards in just one shoot. Changing the SD cards meant that a lot of time was taken up as we were constantly changing them. 

After our rough cut, we felt it best that we use a less complicated camera and use the camera that our school would provide for us. The name of the camera given to us by our school "Sony DCR-TRV19E".  The "Sony DCR-TRV19E" proved a worthy contender with the"Canon 1234B002 Model EOS 30D (SRL)" as the effectiveness of the camera was clear from the beginning, due to the lack of difficulty involved in using it. We found that with the first camera we used, the complicated buttons and knobs on it made it harder to fully use. Although the images we captured were not as clear and highly defined as the "Canon 1234B002 Model EOS 30D (SRL)", this camera was still managed to capture some great footage.

Final Cut

Final cut was an important software that was available to us on the Apple Mac computers that we were using. The main purpose of Final Cut was for the diting of our music video and to edit any other videos that we were to post or publish on our blogs. The editing process was down to Vicky Gordon and Emily Fry, as they were accustomed to using the software and felt comfortable editing our music video.

To use final cut, the video or in this case our video had to be imported into Final Cut and dragged down into a bar below the video. As well as the video, the audio of the song had to be imported and then dragged and locked in the audio bar which again is below the video. Final Cut allowed us to do so many things, such as; use overlays, transitions etc. Throughout our video there are a variety of transitions such cross dissolves. The effects button on the top of Final Cut was responsible for the transitions and other effects we felt we wanted to add to our music video. Because some of the lighting in our video was a bit bleached out, the opacity of the video had to be lowered so that the bleached out effect became less visible.

Not only did we use Final Cut for our music video, we first used it for our storyboard which was done in an animatic form. This was basically a guideline for our group to follow when making our real video in Final Cut. For my own video in Question 1, I used several transitions when creating the video. Before I started my video, I played around with several things so that I could become used to the software as it was my first time using it.  

Quick Time and MPEG Streamclip

Once our video was completed on Final Cut and we were happy with the finished product, it had to be placed on our blogs. Before we could publish this post with our music video on it, we had to export the video into MPEG Streamclip so that it was the correct format for our blog to be able to post it. The format that we then converted it to in MPEG Stream clip was MPEG4. This was the only way of the video being visible on our blogs.

Photoshop

The software Photoshop was used in the production of our digipak which included both our magazine poster and our CD album cover. Both Emily and Vicky took responsibility for the making of our magazine poster whereas Sophie was in charge of making the CD cover for the digipak. The CD cover had to include the front, the back and the insides of the album. The images that were put into Photoshop were mostly screen grabs taken from our music video.  Because of the experience we had gained at AS level whilst using Photoshop, we were already accustomed to using the tools used in the editing of several images. 

Blogger

Blogger throughout our 2 years of being a media student, has played a vital role in my coursework. Without Blogger, my coursework wouldn't exist. Blogger allows you to post text, images and videos all which are presented in form of coursework. Blogger allowed us to deliver very informative posts about our work for the past 2 years.