How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
In my preliminary task, we used one shot and our own audio so therefore it was a very easy task. This made me get back into using the MAC’s so I was getting used to using all the effects again and reminded myself how to do things! Looking at the final product there was so much room for improvement but the lipsyncing was one of the main things and we got that right!
The internet played a bit part in my research! Allowing me access too things about making music videos and editing which really helped me! Also information about digi packs! It helped me understand more into the analytical side of medias. For example seeing how MTV developed and how music videos have changed. Wikepedia has had much help in my research but it is not fully reliable because anyone can add information in!
Youtube was one of the most important parts of my research! I got to watch a lot of music videos and get lots of inspiration from it so I could build up ideas. Watching different, inventive videos made me really think what I could do that was more distinctive!
Planning- Planning was very all over the place, the problem with us, is that we had about 4 different ideas but kept changing them around. We would film and then decide we did not like it! So we met up as a group countless times to talk about it! In the end we sat down and just said we need too choose our final idea and no going back even though it was a risk with the green screen!
Fiming- Our lip singer learnt the songer to remember all of the lip syncing, she sang the song at different angles and also doing things as such as lying down, countless times and that is why we had so many shots. Also we got many angles of Alice, even though we only had two characters we still had many shots.
We used the Ipad to play music out of whilst Louise was lip syncing, Alice was dancing and even when Ellie was dancing too, so they were in time and Louise went along with the lyrics well! So it gave them a lot of support for the feel of the song also.
The cannon 500D, we used to film helped us get clear footage of everything, including Ellie’s dancing, we could do focus and use lots of different effects on it! And for the filming of Alice and Louise it captured the lip syncing in exact and clear image of them both! We also used it for our digi back and used shutter speed to catch Me and Alice jumping and it would of been a lot harder to do this on a normal, simple camera.
The green screen was also used as the main technology in our music video. Everyshot of Louise and Alice involved the green screen which shows it’s importantance to our music video. Without this we would of never got the space effect on our music video therefore not being able to really relate it to our album cover! Our video would of not have been half as fun, interesting and different if it was not for the green screen! It would of probably been more boring and would not of been good to promote a music video.
Loations was not much of a problem because the green screen we done at my friends house as well as doing it in school just because you do not see anything other than the green screen’s use! Also, the filming for Ellie was not too complicated either because we have a modern dance studio in the school. We also used a white screen to do the photography of our Digi pack which we again did in school.
Editing using Final cut pro was the most useful thing we had, our music video was not so much on different locations and getting in lots and lots of filming, we based our video around being in the editing suite a lot, editing different things and playing with the things we can do with the green screen. It was simple and easy to use, and using it last year helped learn more to use it this year, so I was using short cuts to do things quicker and had knowledge on each effect.
Experimenting with effects, included the layering of clips, cropping and fitting clips together, mirroring, changing colours, timing to make sure the video went with the music for example when it was slow we tried to do more Louise with the lyrics and when the beat was fast we would use Alice dancing!
Problems that occurred whilst we were editing with the MAC’s was it kept freezing so we would have to force quit, one time when we did this it deleted all our work we had done in that day. It was solved because we had done many screen shots so we were able to make it look like how we edited before but it was a bit of a pain because it made it more time consuming. 
Because a lot of the time we also had to wait for it to render, we had to wait around for this which was another time consuming thing before we could watch through our video in proper sync.
There was a new final cut when we used the MAC’s but I still understood the main functions, By using a more industry used hardware productivity was high. Understanding shortcuts was essential because it makes it less time consuming. An important feature was the SD card because it made the uploading much easier and quicker.
POST PRODUCTION, we used Fireworks for our poster and also Digipack. We needed layering, text and contrasts. We had to make our work look professional so this was reasonably time consuming when we had to go round the outline of each person jumping because it did not go on the space as well as we thought it would, it was very blocky so therefore did not look professional before we edited around each girl. It reinforced the video and what it’s about, I thought it ended very well looking and interesting to look at.
Evluatiuon- Youtube came a massive help again, for audience feedback it allowed people to view it, including my friends instead of going to the MAC’s to look at it. The skill we had to create an evaluation and talk about what we had learnt and made it seem like a very realistic situaton. It made me think about what we could improve on if we were do to it again.
And now I look back on the music video, I realise that I do agree and think we could of used more people and more shots because it is rather repetitive and maybe add a bit of narrative in there because that is what we had originally. But on a whole I really enjoy the video we created, I think it is fun and goes so well with the lyrics as well as the song and digi pack! I would use the green screen again and now I have experience and confidence with using it.
brennan25 