Question 4

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

We had to find an artist to create a music promo for, but it had to be an unsigned artist. Originally we used a website called unsigned.com this seemed like the best way of finding an artist. It turns out that the site wouldn’t always work it would freeze frequently meaning that it would be hard to work with. We were looking an indie style song. We decide to look on YouTube; this was hard as a lot of music is already copyrighted on YouTube. We finally found a song called Benchwarmers by the artist Finn riggings, we decided to use this song and we emailed the artist straight away.

Throughout the entire production and planning stages we used YouTube a lot to get ideas and inspiration. It was also good for showing us the typical conventions of our genre. It really should us different camera shot we could use and different effects and transitions. From looking at YouTube videos we learnt quite a few new skills and found out how to create an effective shot that panned, we learnt how to keep it smooth and not shaky. We used a tripod to keep the shot steady, we tried it three different ways, one way with the tripod on the floor, this got an ultra-steady shot but I believe it was too steady, so we tried it completely without the trip pod and this make the shot so unsmooth, so we watched another YouTube video and it showed us how to use the tripod a boom, this made the shot incredibly smooth and it just looked a lot better.

We also learnt how to use a green screen and the correct lighting. This was something we were all new to, the lighting really makes the shots clear on the singers face, it’s a lot easier to see their expressions. Learning how to use a green screen was very beneficial as we could change the background or the colour of the background to anything we wanted. When using the light we did get a slight bit of shadow, but this didn’t effective the quality of the green screen that much.

This year we learnt how to frame the shots correctly to fit our artist’s typical genre. The shots looked a lot better this year, whereas in the past the seemed very simple and boring. We used a variety of shots and different ways of filming the shots, these ideas were all influenced from YouTube and the internet.

Blogger was another very useful technology. This technology, even though so very simple its just so very helpful. It is help as it helps you keep track of your work and with the headings you have created you can really keep your work organised, I have used this all the way through to keep my work on track. During every stage I have referred back to as a reference to keep me focused and on track. Being able to post my work online maybe be very beneficial to the rest of my group so we all know what we are doing to work as a team.

During the production process we decided to use Adobe Premiere Pro. We originally started on iMovie but instantly thought it wasn’t good enough for what we wanted to achieve. We had a look at Final Cut and also decided we didn’t like it, as we believed the quality of Premiere Pro and its interface is much better to work with. We wanted to learn a new skill, so we all decided to learn how to use Premiere pro, we were mainly self-taught just be experimenting but YouTube and Adobe’s tutorials page also helped. Premiere has so much more capabilities than IMovie, one big reason why we decided to change was that the green feature on iMovie is very basic whereas the green screen feature of Premiere went into a lot of detail and enabled us to fine tune the effect. Premiere Pro you change the time scale, this meant we could precisely and accurately get all of the lip syncing in time with the send without having to randomly guess it like iMovie. Also on Premiere we left how to move shots around the screen and flip images. With Premiere you can place your soundtrack, sound effects, clips and footage on all different layers, this jut made life so simple, it really showed you were everything was and it also meant you can hide layers if need be to focus of a certain layer, this also made it easier to make the lip syncing shots flow and work a lot better; as you can precisely find the point in the shot where the singer first opens their mouth to sing and you can match it to the soundtrack. Another thing Premiere affectively do was to add text over the top of the video, this was very quick and simple, but it gave a clean professional look to the video. We also had a shot that was quite long and in the clip the camera jolts and shakes, so to keep the shot looking steady and professional we had to cut the clip down to a size which suited the video and got rid of the camera work mistake.

 

Another good technology that was very beneficial to promoting and artist was Adobe Photoshop, there are a wide range of things you can do with this technology and it was proven really useful in creating our magazine advert and digipak. I had learnt to use Photoshop in my GCSE graphics lessons and I was able to apply my pervious knowledge to my work. One things I really love about Photoshop is the layers option, just makes creating any work simple and quite efficient, just like on Premiere it enabled to see things a lot easier and hide things that I didn’t need to focus of.

A really simple but effective tool we used in the production of our digipak was that of the filter gallery, its very simple and it just and a very interesting effect to the image. We choose to use the “Cutout” style, this make it look very eye catching and also helped create a band image. Also we didn’t like the original background behind the main subject (masked man) so we changed the background, we did this by carefully using the lasso tool around the man and then deleted the background and then put a new one in and placed it on the later below. With the new background it catches the audience attention as it has a slight more eye catching colour, a little warmer.