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

Fortunately, today's society evolves around technology where it is used not just for leisure but in the workplace as well. As part of research and planning, it was essential for us to find music videos which were relevant to our genre to gain ideas to incorporate to our own video. 

Youtube played a big part in terms of viewing different indie music videos and the extra features such as the amount of views allowed us to see how successful the video was. It is a well-known site where people can share and upload videos. Increasingly, it is becoming popular for new, upcoming artists to share their music and gain support from the public. The use of likes/dislikes and comments used when viewing the video allows the artist to see how the video is being perceived.  

Google also helped me find images of indie artists' digipaks and advertisement enabling me to see what features were most commonly used. This helped me during the research and planning process because I was able to gain inspiration from other digipaks and apply to my own. 






Ellie Goulding's 'Lights' was a big influence on my work because I found the simplicity of the black and gold theme appealing and stood out. 

I used Blogger to create the blog to feature the music video and online track in progress of producing the video and ancillary texts which was very easy to use. Relating to artists in the music industry, blogging is a good way of communicating with their fans and getting an immediate response from them. From the audience's point of view, this builds on the interaction already established between the artist seeing them on a personal level. 

As part of research, we used a digital camera to take different shots and angles which we would use when shooting our music video. This was then created into an animatic showing the audience an idea of what the video would look like. 

To shoot the video, we used a Canon video camera with extra memory cards to store the footage onto. It was a good learning experience for me to use the camera to shoot different shots and angles suiting to the tone of the song. The memory cards allowed us to shoot as much footage as we could, giving us a range of shots and angles to work with in editing. 

To edit the music video, we used Final Cut Pro which is an editing program where we could apply transitions and effects onto footage. We could change the position of the way the footage is appeared on screen and this is evidently seen in our video where the close-up of Imogen's lips is seen to be moving left to right slightly. To improve this shot, we could film extra shots of the close-up scene with her not moving as the current shot shows bad framing. 

             

Photoshop was used for the construction of the ancillary products where I was able to apply to crop pictures and apply text. I used the 'magic wand tool' to crop out the image from the photo we took of Imogen to transfer onto the digipak front cover. As having a black and gold theme, I used a black background with gold font where I wanted to make the digipak look simple yet eye-catching. With the advertisement, I wanted to continue the black and gold theme to make sure there was a clear visual link between the two texts. This makes it easier for the audience to connect the artist with the texts establishing their public image. 

I also used Photoshop to produce the animatic where we were able to make a clip inserting images onto the soundtrack. This gave us a chance to plan the sequence for the video and test how we would film the different angles making sure they worked together.  Alternatively, we could also experiment with transitions and effects that we were mostly likely to use in our video.