EVALUATION QUESTION 4

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

When it came to deciding what song and artist we would use for our ancillary tasks we had to use a website known as unsigned.com. This is because it has a wide range of artists that are currently unsigned, so therefore we could use any of the artist’s songs in our promo. However we had no such look finding a band that would be suitable, so we then decided to look elsewhere and we were then successful in find a band on you tube known as B.I.T.E. the song we chose was called ‘Rock Pride’ which was a glam rock themed song. We then contacted the band and they were happy to send us the lyrics which were a big help in terms of the promo.

When it came to researching for our promotional package we used You Tube as it enabled us to find good example videos of successful music promos. This applies especially to videos within the Glam Rock genre. What You Tube helped with the most was in finding the song we used for our promo. You Tube can also allow us to take stills from the same genre videos and compare them with ours to see if we have lived up to their standards.

When constructing our 3 media texts we used many different types of technology. For our music promo we used an Apple software called Final Cut Pro on an Apple MAC for editing. On our prelim music promo we originally used i movie but found out that this new software was more responsive, had more features and more technologies. A picture of the software can be shown below, which shows a part of our music promo on it.

When constructing the magazine and digipack we used a photo editing software known as Photoshop. This software allowed us to create an effective magazine advert and digipack due to the range of effects and tools that can be used to manipulate an image.

During the whole process of the making of our promo I learnt many different new skills. As my main role was in the editing process I learnt how to use final cut pro to a high standard and how to constructive a music video in terms of narrative and performance. I had a small amount of knowledge in final cut at first however I fortunate enough to get the hang of it very fast and put what I learnt into the promo  I also was in charge of making sure that the set was as realistic as possible which taught me how to successfully construct a set. I was also involved in filming which taught me how to use more handheld shots and making sure that shots where framed correctly.

On the first shoot day for filming our music promo we encountered a few problems that convinced us to conduct a second day of filming. This is because most of the first day’s footage was out of focus. This was due to the cameras not having the right adjustments on the auto focus. We also noticed a distinct difference between Jamie’s camera and my camera. We noticed that the footage was coming out a little differently and Jamie’s was a bit clearer than mine. This led us to come to the decision of only using Jamie’s camera to one keep the footage all the same and two to use the camera which had the better focus. On the second day we had to change the auto focus to manual focus just to get a little bit sharper picture. We also had to change two of the band members for the second day so this meant that most of the first day footage was nearly useless. On the second day though we stuck to a more accurate schedule of shots and got some really impressive footage. The shot schedule is shown below along with some bad footage of the first shoot day.

The Internet is a very useful tool as it has helped us to exhibit our video over the world. For example once downloading the video onto You Tube, we then shared it with Facebook to allow others around the world to watch it. Facebook is a good way to show everybody what we have created. Publicising the video online is the best way to exhibit a video as nearly everyone has computers, i Pods or any other devices that connect to the Internet. People can then either follow the link to the You Tube video or just watch it on the social networking site.