Question 4: How did you use new technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used lots of technologies throughout every stage of this project, some new, some old. With the technologies I’d already used before I was able to develop my skills and become more confident when using them.

Research & planning (pre – product)

Before starting our music video I did some research into exiting real media video including analysing the real music video for ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’, along with other music videos from bands such as ‘The Fray’ as they are the same genre as The Script. I also looked at their social networking sites and read some of the comments to see what the fans like about their music and the bands official music videos so that we can add that in to our video to make it more appealing to the audience. We also storyboarded and took notes using Microsoft PowerPoint. For my ancillary task I used the internet to look at the script’s website (http://www.thescriptmusic.com/gb/home/), but not only did I look at bands website that are similar to ‘The Script’ including Muse (http://muse.mu/) but I also looked at some pop artist as well such as Jessie J (http://jessiejofficial.com/) I did this so that I could get the best possible research, that way I can pick up elements from music website in generally. I also used the internet for the research of my advert and lanyard with Google images.

Construction (production)

In the production stage most of it was done using technologies. We filmed the actual video on a Sony Handycam camera. After doing that we uploaded on to the video editing machines using PMB that software also converted the clips into WMA format. We actually edited all the footage in Premier Pro, instead of importing all the clips into premier pro we viewed them in windows media player first, this also helped us so that we knew when we were going to cut it when we finally imported it into premier pro. I learnt a lot of new skills in Premier Pro for example about adding key frames to add movement to each shot, throughout the music video we only used one kind of visual transition which was a cross dissolve, I learnt how much more professional videos looked when only one transition is used. When filming the band and lead male singing shots I brought my Bose SoundLink Wireless Mobile Speakers and played the song through my iPhone, this helped when it came to editing the lip-syncing together.  For our ancillary tasks we had two photo shoots, one on location the other in the studio. When on location we used a Canon Powershot camera and in the studio I used another digital camera. To actually create my ancillary tasks i used three Adobe CS3 software’s altogether. They are: Photoshop for the advert, lanyard, and website banner and also for editing images. Dreamweaver for the actual webpages and the rollover buttons for the website were created in Flash. The biggest skill I learnt while using the software’s was that I now know how to add YouTube videos in to Dreamweaver, I gained this new skill from trial and error and also YouTube tutorials. As well as using YouTube for tutorials it was also very useful as the little behind the scenes videos needed to be uploaded on to YouTube first before the short videos can be posted on Blogger. I also created a Prezzie to show the development and draft work of my ancillary tasks. Below is a short video of my filming one of the flashbacks in Greenwich using the Sony Handycam.

Evaluation (post product)

I got a variety of people to evaluate our music video, all of the reviews where filmed on different cameras, I think this is a good thing has I have the ability and skills to use a variety of cameras correctly, and for example one camera I used was a Samsung Schneider Kreuznach. We also had a Creative arts evening where our video was shown on the big screen to an audience, after we set up a little booth and recorded people’s reactions to the video we used the same cameras we shot the actual video on which was a Sony Handycam. On the same camera the three of us did a piece to camera analysing our music video. I recorded a shot video on my iPhone about my ancillary tasks.