Evaluation 3: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the filming process, me and my group have used many different types of media technologies, such as new video cameras and memory cards, so we had to learn about how to use them, as there were many buttons and commands to master.

 

For example, there were controls for the focussing of the shots, which was important for the final outcome of the music video. Coinciding with this was the zoom, as we learnt that the more you zoomed in, the lower the quality of the shot got, so we put the camera closer to Imogen, rather than zooming at any point.

We used a digital camera, like the one above, to capture moments during filming to upload on our blog. This helped us keep up to date on our locations and other shots we could include in the video

There was also the matter of converting our videos to MP4 Quicktime from Final Cut Pro, as it made it easier to upload them onto our blogs, also, it made them smaller and therefore easier to screenshot. However, doing this made the quality worse, and sometimes meant the video was pixellated.

We also used Blogger, although I was already confident on this, so I knew what I was doing. On the other hand, I had to work hard to make the blog look interesting and make people want to read it. To do this I put pictures, videos and other media up, as well as changing the font colour to make important information stand out more to the reader.

  

I also used the internet for research purposes, including websites such as YouTube and Vevo to find other music videos, and to watch other videos by our chosen artist, Marina and the Diamonds, to see what sort of style we should use.

To edit our video, we used Final Cut Pro. As I had already used it in my AS year I was quite confident with the editing, cutting and changing of all our shots. We didn't use any filters in our video, but we could have used selective colours at certain points to make Imogen stand out more. We also used Final Cut to make an animatic of our storyboard, showing how our video was going to be made.

During the making of my digipak, me and my group used a lot of different programs to make it the best we could. I started out by drawing my planned digipak, which isn't a media technology, but it helped me get an idea of what I wanted to do and work out how to do it.

Next was Adobe Photoshop, which had a lot of effects to add onto images. I used the spotlight tool to lighten Imogen's face so much that some of her features couldn't be seen, allowing me to put the name of the album and the artist in that place.

I also so used Imogen's tablet to draw the two trees on the inside panels. This allowed me to draw exactly what I wanted, rather than try to recreate it on Paint, or find what I wanted on Google Images. I had never used a tablet before, and it made me realise that not everything needs to be done on Photoshop to look good or how you want it to look.