JM - Evaluation Q4 - ICT

We used a blog to document and represent our work throughout our music video. Blogger.com allowed us to show deconstructions of other music videos, our own ideas and document any filming we did and to show any developments the group made to the music video, such as our Pitch and Audience Research. One of the key parts of Blogger was the interactivity available to the group, the blog enabled us to comment on each other’s ideas and developments, improving the communication in the groups, thus ultimately improving the production.  Furthermore the group were also able to embed clips from YouTube, this meant that if a group member found a particular music video they wanted to show to the group, we were able to do this quickly and easily.

Leading on from this we were also able to upload our presentations onto Blogger.com, through the use of SlideBoom. The online software, Slideboom allowed the group to upload presentations we created on Microsoft PowerPoint.  This meant that it was easier for the group to give our presentations throughout our stages of Audience Research.

We also used  Survey Monkey for our audience research. Survery Monkey provides a variety of templates enabling you to produce your own questionnaire. Once the questionnaire has been produced you can also embed  the questionnaire on a social networking site, for example Facebook. This meant that we could reach an increasing number of our audience through Web 2.0, improving our sample size. Once the questionnaires had been completed the results were collaborated and put into graphs were appropriate.

In the planning stages of our production we undertook selected stages of development. Firstly we constructed a storyboard. For this we printed off a set structure and began to hand draw the different frames. In the storyboard we attempted to represent the distance, angle, movement of the shots, main mise-en-scene and to show a variety of montage editing. After the storyboard had been completed we then underwent the construction of an animatic. For this we set up a Tripod and Camera from a high angle perspective and took a still of each frame. Once the stills had been uploaded onto Adobe Premiere, our chosen editing software, we time stretched the particular clips the selected duration of each frame. Through the use of the editing we constructed the animatic with the cutting rate adjusted to the track to gain a full understanding of the required shot lengths. The animatic gave the group an understanding of the amounts of shots required for a music video. However after the production it is possible to say that we may have become to dependent on referring back to our story board and not experimenting.

For our production we used  a HD handheld camera. We were familiar with this camera as we had used it the previous year for our foundation portfolio coursework. However we did come across and issue with battery life of the cameras, this was overcome by taking numerous batteries on each shoot. Furthermore we also found that shooting in a darkly lit area inside gave a grainy effect to the footage that we had not anticipated this therefore had to be manipulated in the editing stages.

To edit our footage we used Adobe Premiere 9.0 software. A technique of this software we used was for our CCTV shot shown below. To achieve this effect we used ’16 point garbage matting’, the effect proved to be particularly time consuming as each point had to be manipulated to fit each screen. 

Premiere also allowed the group to add transitions, for example fade to black, and cross dissolve to the next frame. As mentioned before we also used image control to manipulate the brightness and saturation, this was particularly useful for our Hippie Scene.

Blogger, Survey Monkey and SlideBoom are all examples of Web 2.0 and the increasing pluralistic landscape as the software allows the audience to become the author. This is an example of pull technology of media, and why our group chose to use the three types of online software.

In Adobe Photoshop, we manipulated our photos of the protagonist to use for our ancillary texts to match our video production. For the digipak we agreed on a four-pane CD case. Photoshop allowed us to manipulate each image separately, and then paste in the image to the chosen size of our digipak. 

Throughout of print texts a continuous ‘Cutout’ effect was used on the images. This effect gave a cartoon effect onto the image. Another motif of our print media was the dark red background. The link between the digipak, advertisement and tour poster construct a Star image for the artists.