Evaluation Question 4

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


Production:


Cannon 550D

The Cannon 550D is an impressive camera. Although it's designed to be a stills camera it is still able to capture very high definition film. Luckily for my group I happen to own this rather exquisite camera, and we were extremely lucky to be given Premier Pro CS5 to edit on because it's one of the few softwares that's able to handle the quality. This is a very new media technology because it films onto digital memory rather than tape. This allowed us to avoid capturing in the lengthy process we're used to and to instead copy the footage straight over. The camera was easy to handle for handheld shots and this gave us a variety of options while filming.

Lights

Strobe; 650 Watt Redhead lights; Neon Bulbs

Artificial lighting was only necessary for our performance. Natural, outdoor lighting proved to be excellent for the narrative filming, especially under the lens' of the canon.


For the performance, however, we had to use a set of 3 650 watt Readhead lights. In total we had 3 performance shoots, and although our first shoot was over-exposed, it proved to be a learning curve and the second and during the second and third shoots the equipment proved invaluable.


For the second section of our performance, we decided to use neon paint which meant that the lighting needed to change. We used 2 neon bulbs, one above the performance and another at the side. Without those bulbs the neon element would not have been possible and there would have been no progression to our performance.

Premier Pro

Premier Pro CS5 was a fantastic editing software. Having a firm knowledge of CS3 I got to grips with the latest update quickly. We used Premier Pro to edit our track. The brief stated that our video must be 3 minutes or less, and our track selection was 4 minutes 30 seconds; even though Premier Pro is primarily for editing video, it worked brilliantly for cutting down and marginally speeding up our track, so it was under 3 minutes long.

We also used Premier Pro to create a promo montage-style video for the screening of all our music videos.

Photoshop

Photoshop was used heavily throughout the construction of our video, website and album cover. The album cover template itself was presented to us in a photoshop (.psd) format, making it the essential software to use for stills editing and graphics.

We created our main band logo on Photoshop:

After making this logo the blue and black colour scheme became consistent to our branding; as did the font of our name. The smokey effect round the letters was achieved through Photoshop and was also a motif we used across our album cover and website.

See here our album cover, which was entirely constructed in Photoshop:

We used Photoshop to edit promo pictures of the band, which were then used on our album cover and website. It helped us change the tints of pictures and put effects on them which suited our cold and metallic colour scheme.

The top shot is after the editing, the bottom is beforehand.

We used Photoshop to create a poster for an event with our band and another groups band together. We thought this was a good example of synergy, and could be made possible by Photoshop.







Colour

Here is a short video demonstrating the uses of our colour correcting software:

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 was used so much in the construction of our product. Particularly Wix.com was the website we used to make our website. It is a flash based online website designer. We were the first year in our school to get to use this software, and it proved to be a fantastic way to integrate our website in with the rest of our project.



You can embed videos, pictures, hyperlinks and sound files in to your website through Wix, and it allows for high levels of visual customisation, with many buttons, effects and features available.

Research:


Web 2.0
Google street view allowed us to location scout without having to leave our homes. Using youtube for inspiration, facebook questionaires to get an idea of what our audience likes, looking at other bands websites.. The list of uses is almost endless.

Before even proposing and song and video idea, we needed to gather information and inspiration from the huge array of videos now available online, through services such as YouTube and GoogleVideo.






Evaluation:


Web 2.0
YouTube and Facebook for posting our video and receiving feedback; and the YouTube video statistics will prove interesting later on after some views have (hopefully) amassed, we will be able to see if our video is watched by the demographic for which it was intended.



Using Facebook, we also made an event for our screening, which helped to promote it.




And finally, arguably the most important new media technology we have used:


BLOGGER!


We have used Blogger across all areas of the project; it is how we present all of our work and research findings to our teachers and examinator and the overall framework of our project.



All along the way, we have used blog posts on both our individual and group blogs to log progress and to present our portfolio.