Q4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

www.unsigned.com is the website we were set to use to find an artist/band that we could use to create a music video, because we made the choice to create and use our own music. This meant we didn’t have to use this site, this allowed us to make creative decisions when recording to put in sections that we could adapt when filming. It also meant that we could get straight on with thinking about what we wanted in the video as we already had a skeleton track recorded, we then went back and re-recorded it in a much higher quality to make the video as professional as possible.

We used Facebook as a way of researching what people expect in a music video. We produced a questionnaire and posted it to our friends and also a Hardcore page, this allowed us to get answers from people who enjoy various genres, giving us a wider amount of research. We also used Facebook to contact certain people for quotes on lighting rigs and also to ask if we could use certain locations. We used this way of contacting them as we felt it was much quicker to get a response than using e-mail. This technology has also helped us to gain feedback on our final products, as it was an effective and simple way of exhibiting our final pieces.

We have used this technology to present our finalised products, this has helped us to spread it to a wider audience, Twitter also has a hashtag feature, this has allowed us to use a # on the post and this places it in a category so that anyone who searches that hashtag will see it, you can use multiple hashtags, making it available in the categories we have chosen to use.

We used Photoshop in the constructing of our digipak. This program allowed us to create the full design for our album and also allowed us to layer up the shots we had from filming and also the text we wanted to use for the title in a professional style. This program helped us to produce a product that we are happy with and confident that we met the plans we set out to do on it as it gives you enough freedom when creating a product and allows you to add any creative flair you have along the way.

Whilst we were in the stages of research we heavily relied upon YouTube to research our chosen genre. This helped us with the music, the clothing and also to understand the conventions of a hardcore genre video. Although we used it to research our chosen genre, we also used it to look at other genres to see what the general conventions of a music video were and to also get any influences from them. This technology has also allowed us to exhibit the final promo, this has also given us the opportunity to see a range of people’s responses to the video through them commenting and liking/disliking the video, helping us to decide as to whether our final product was successful or not.

We chose to make a video for our own track, we have had to quickly pick up and learn how to use Logic Pro to record an effective and professional song; we had multiple sessions in the studio and researched how all the elements of a track such as this work together. This allowed us to get the right feel for the song as we wanted it to really hit all conventions of a hardcore track.

When editing our video, we found that when it came to the ‘breakdown’ of the song, this section was far too long and the shots would get repetitive, so we decided to go back into Logic Pro and slice down a section of the breakdown to make the overall song 4:27 to 3:52.

We have used this technology to edit our images for our digipak, we used Lightroom for this as it gives you the ability to offer very detailed alterations in a simple and easy to do fashion, we were able to increase the contrasts of the shots and also take down exposure issues. We were planning on using this program for more as it was very easy to use however it didn’t offer the option to add text on top, we took the images from here and put them through Photoshop.

 Once we had created our final mix for the song, we used Soundcloud to upload them onto the internet, we were then able to use Soundcloud to analyse the song more in depth and add comments straight onto the song itself, this became an effective way for us to evaluate sections of the song to say what we liked or what we could add onto certain sections.

We used this technology in the construction of our music video; we had the choice of using this editing software or iMovie. We chose to use this as we feel we are much more suited to this editing software and also we felt that it would give us more freedom to increase the technicality within our shots and shot editing, examples of this are our uses of layering clips using opacity and multiple colour corrections, both features that Final Cut Pro can offer in a much more detailed, stylistic way.

From this project I have developed my skills in using the editing software to create a professional and effective final product. We have used black and white effects alongside with colour correction on our narrative clips to create a better and more conventional video. This is a technique I feel I have learnt confidently and developed since the work I have produced previous.

In terms of editing I feel I have grown in confidence a lot from our preliminary video to this music video. This is evident in my editing style, in our prelim I felt I focused too much on keeping every change to a specific beat in the song as I thought this was the only way to create a video that had an effective flow, however in this music video, conventionally the editing is very fast, although we tried to keep most editing to the beat, we also made some on the offbeat, this allowed the video to feel a bit edgy and stopped it from becoming too predictable.

I also feel I have become more independent in my ideas for editing and shot planning. I believe this is shown in the layered opacity shot, we used an opacity shot in our prelim, however that was simply to just show the fact we were traveling in the car. I feel that our use of it in the music video is much more stylistic to the genre and works really well at showing how we have taken a simple idea and made it look more professional in the video, this shot also had to be planned very well as we had to make sure that the camera was completely still and the shot was composed right to get both actor in without it crossing over as before we used two completely different shots.

This production has given me the chance to learn and develop better skills when it comes to shooting and planning the shots that are needed in the filming process. Once we had created our storyboard/shot list for the video we then decided we wanted to alter a section of it, instead of not pre-planning this scene change like I would have done before, we created another storyboard just for that section. This helped us a lot when it came to filming and also gave us a chance to add even more effective shot types in that we did not think of before.

I have also learnt that you should really think about continuity when filming, an example of the difference here is in my prelim we have a costume change from one shot to another, so when filming our video we made sure everyone was wearing the right clothes for that filming session.

In terms of my shooting, I feel I have become a lot more confident in knowing how to film in a certain style, when filming our prelim we kept the camera very still on most playing shots and kept them very basic. However, in our music video, I feel we have really taken into account the energy of the song and replicated that in our shooting method, keeping the camera moving and almost timed the camera movement with the music, an example of this is when filming drums, we chose to go from a mid-shot to a close up, instead of using two shots we used camera movement to change the shot type, I feel this have given us a much better continuity to the video.

For this project I feel I have become a lot more confident in using programs such as Final Cut Pro, Lightroom and Photoshop and have learnt how to bring them up to a higher professional standard using the Apple MacBook Pro. Final Cut Pro was the software we used to create our video, this program allowed us to create a very professional looking promo whilst still being extremely easy to use, this gave us the confidence to go that bit further to make it a bit more personal to our taste by adding our own creative flairs. The Apple Macbook Pro, Photoshop and Lightroom have aided me to creating our digipak and website. I have learnt how to use Lightroom to edit photographs we have taken to fit a certain style (hardcore genre) without making them look very unrealistic. As well as developing my skills on Lightroom I feel I have grown in confidence using Photoshop, this is evident in our digipak, we wanted to keep our text similar to our website but was finding it hard to get the right look, we decided to make the background behind it look like ripped paper, this was a hard technique however I believe it gave us a stronger image in the outcome. (Top image is the title of the band off the website and the one below is the edited title for the digipak)

We had a couple of problems that we faced when filming that I feel we overcame very professionally:

We have used blogger as a way of noting down our research, planning and the final ideas for our music video. This technology has helped me to be able to keep all my work in a structured plan, making sure all our research was up to date. This was useful to us as we could access it very easily and quickly when it came round to needing it, this also creates one large area where all your planning will be, thus stopping you from losing it.

 We have used search engines such as Google and Bing to find and source information and pictures for our planning and research for our music video. We also used search engines as a mean to understand the conventions of our chosen genre, this helped us to understand genre a lot more before we started planning and filming our music video to make it as effective as possible.