Friday, 8 January 2016

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




We used YouTube as a way of finding our artist through their links with other artists in the genre. When searching YouTube for “indie artists”, many different videos of different signed and unsigned artists would be shown, however once watching a video you are given a side bar full of other similar videos, through looking through many links, we found Natalie Lungley, a British unsigned indie artist, and we were able to find a song of hers that we liked by going onto her channel and looking through her original music. YouTube was also very helpful in that we could quickly find and watch music videos that would inspire our work such as Lana Del Rey and Twenty One Pilots. Without this our video would not have been as entertaining and effective. 

Facebook was used to contact Natalie Lungley, where we messaged her privately through her public page about whether it was okay for us to use her song for our music video. We also used Facebook as a means of communication where we created a group chat and used it to discuss work and arrange plans to meet. This was effective as it was a quick way to communicate as a group rather than texts individuals, therefore being much quicker and enabled us to be more organised.

 We contacted her through Facebook to see if she would give us permission to use her song. YouTube was effective as we were able to skim through many songs in a short amount of time that linked to each other. We also used Facebook as a way of communicating as a group to arrange where we were at and where to meet, and also a place to exhibit different stages of our production. Without Facebook it would’ve been much more difficult to communicate as a group compared to if we had just used text messenger or face to face chatting.

We used YouTube to explore other videos such as Lana Del Rey and Twenty One Pilots as inspiration for our promo and gather ideas on where to go from our starting point. I found YouTube more effective than if I had used music channels as I could be more specific with my searches and look at what I needed to.

The technologies I used to construct my promo were programmes online such as Glogster, padlet and moovley which enabled me to create online presentations to add to my blog as summaries of my research and planning. Glogster and padlet are great alternatives to PowerPoint as they have a lot more visual aesthetics that you can use. Moovley is an interesting way of presenting your work in video/cartoon form making ordinary text much more interesting to see.

I have learnt about composition and using a range of shots including a lot of close ups and extreme close ups. This is to make the video more engaging and interesting for the audience as the constant change in focus and visuals keeps the audience’s attention. I’ve developed my skills in having steady shots and straight shots in order to get a professional look to the video which is important in how you present your media company. The editing skills I have developed are cutting to the beat where the cuts are arranged onto the beats in the instrumentals of the music, this is important in order to make the music video flow properly and seem professional to the audience.

We also had to use an canon dlsr to film which was useful as it had a range of functions and superior zoom to the iPhone we had previously used. The function that we had used were mainly to focusing, switching from auto focus to manual which created very effective shots.  

I have also developed my Photoshop skills with adding colour to black and white images to emphasise certain areas of the image which was a key concept in the ancillary tasks. This emphasis on certain parts highlighted the important Mise-en-scene in our video and where the audience should focus.  I also had to learn to edit the shots onto the music in iMovie which was difficult to get perfectly lip synced, which is why we took it in turns checking everything was right. Getting the lip syncing right was important in getting the right professional look.

Other technologies used include blogger to post all of our work, which were important in organising our work and planning, so that it could be easily found. iTunes was useful in buying  the song to get permission to use it and having a high quality version to play when filming.

Overall the benefits of exhibiting our work online was that we could get quick and easy feedback through texts on poll everywhere and Facebook comments where the feedback would all be arranged in one place. If we had used paper forms of feedback of would’ve been much harder to put together the feedback and was more likely that we lost feedback.

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