Question 4 Draft: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the year our group has relied on many various forms of media technology to produce our product. These technologies and techniques have not just been applied to the construction of the product, but have been used extensively throughout the research, planning and evaluation stages.
During our research stage of developing our music video, we used mainly Microsoft office programs (uploaded via slideshare) to showcase our research findings. We found during our research that Microsoft Office programs, such as word and powerpoint were industry standard and popular. We also found them simple to use and they allowed us to easily document our findings in a way so that anyone could easily interpret or examine. All of these individual elements of our Media Portfolio we found could be best kept in the form of a blog. We used a website called Blogger, a user friendly and free blogging site that we were all comfortable using. This technique of having our work on blog format allowed us to easily keep track of all our documents and to organise them efficiently into the categories they fall under. These categories are research, planning, construction and evaluation.
During the planning stage of our music video, we realised that relying on Microsoft office tools alone would simply not be the best way to get across our vision of what we wanted in our video. We began to look and search for new programs, tools and techniques to showcase our planning ideas. One of the new ways we used media technologies in our portfolio was the use of the video hosting website Youtube. Youtube is easily the most popular and largest hosting website in the world, leading to us using it to publically post videos of us testing out various different cameras, studio/location testing and our storyboard animatic. We realised this was the best way as the videos could be simply embedded into our blog and were accessible to anyone who viewed it.
During this stage, our group created many props and costume ideas for our video, along with a storyboard. As these were all physical elements as opposed to digital, we figured the best way to show them would be to take pictures of them using a camera followed uploading them directly the blog. The camera we used was a Canon 650d provided by one of our group members, which we thought captured, the props, especially the masks, with enough detail to seem clear to anyone viewing it. This ultimately became the camera we filmed our video with. Before coming to the conclusion that we wanted to use the Canon DSLR camera we tried out another camera. The camera we tried initially was a Panasonic HC-V110 camcorder provided by the college. Whilst testing this camera our group realised that the camera failed to work well in low light, which played an important factor in our video, specifically the band shots. This camera also failed to capture video with the quality we desired, which we discovered was achievable with the canon.
Once we felt we had planned our video to a certain extent, we moved on with the construction of our Music Video, Digipak and Poster. Our first move was to film the footage we needed (in accordance with our shooting schedule) to be edited. Using our chosen camera, we also hired out a track/dolly, tripod and zoom lens. These 3 pieces of equipment widened our range of different filming techniques, giving us more choices on which shots to use. Once we had the footage that we needed, we had to choose video editing software. The editing software we had chosen was Final Cut Pro. Our decision to use this program was based primarily on how we could access it easily during lessons. This made it so that we could edit during lesson as well as outside, and that everyone in our group had a chance to edit the video as opposed to just having one member edit the whole thing. Another reason our group chose this piece of software was that everyone in our group had used it before at one point, ultimately allowing us to save time learning the program from scratch prior to editing.