Question 4 - Written Up

Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Develop into a video evaluation and show screen shots relating to each section.

When the A2 project firstly started, we decided to use Mac to complete our portfolios.  Mac is a line of personal computers (PCs) designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc. It is targeted mainly at the home, education and creative professional markets. Steve Jobs introduced the Mac 128K on January 24, 1984. This was the first mass-market personal computer featuring a graphical user interface and mouse. Mac systems found success in education and desktop publishing and kept Apple as the second-largest PC manufacturer until 1994 when it was overtaken by Compaq.Mac’s are very important within the technology industry and it seemed useless not to use one, as it would give me more experience with getting to terms with how they work. Mac’s offer a wide variety of software, which differs from Final cut Express HD – which helped us when constructing our music video together. Final Cut Express HD is a non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc and later Apple Inc. The software allows users to log and transfer video onto a hard drive, where it can be edited, processed and output to a wide variety of formats. It enabled us to cut parts out which we no longer wanted to feature in our video, as well as speeding up specific scenes and many other transitions were available to us. The Mac computers also offered us Photoshop, which is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems. Adobe Photoshop is released in two editions: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Extended, with the Extended having extra 3D image creation, motion graphics editing and advanced image analysis features. Again helped greatly within our project, as it allowed us to change the colour and saturation of the photographs to make them more visually effective when presented onto the digipak and advert. Another advantage of using a mac apple computer was that it provides the ability to screen shot the specific part of the page that you wanted, without having to crop anything. We adopted this technique from start to finish in our project in order to photograph and evidence our work. Throughout our project we used mostly Google Chrome when we needed internet access, as this is the fastest web browser and sometimes Firefox had some technical difficulties and wouldn’t let us to upload posts to our blogger.

Blogger is an important part of our project too, this is where we saved all of our research and construction, as well as planning and evaluation. Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com. a user can have up to 100 blogs per account. It is also very useful as I am able to access it at college as well as at home, so therefore it came handy when I was doing media work at home.  When we first set up our blogger accounts, we wanted to keep ourselves very organized and neat and tidy, in order for us to keep on top of our work and prevent us from falling behind. So therefore we made tabs along the top of our blog, which split our work up into different sections. We had 4 different tabs which were; ‘Research’, ‘Planning & Construction’, ‘Final Products’ and ‘Evaluation’. Having work split up into specific sections made it a lot clear to us and we then were able to identify what we needed to do in each section and what work we hadn’t yet completed. Blogger let me merge images within my work too. Which allowed me to import pictures under specific text, which made the post seem more interesting instead of just a full page of writing. This became very useful when describing the images we had chosen to feature in our digipak, as we were able to present them to our audience. Along with being able to incorporate images, we also had the choice of which size we wanted the images to be presented on our blogger, which differed from small to extra large.

We used Slide Share to embed files onto our blog. Slide Share is a web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following formats: Power Point, PDF, Keynote or Open Document presentations. We also used Prezi, which is a Hungarian software company, producing a cloud-based presentation software and storytelling tool for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. We used this software to present our work in an alternative way and to show that we were using a variety of media technologies.  YouTube was used effectively throughout the whole of our A2 project. It is a video-sharing website, created by three former /PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006, which users can upload, view and share videos. We used it to carry out research on inspirational music videos to give us some ideas, and also to upload rough cuts and final cuts.  Microsoft word was used to present our work which was of much higher detail, such as research, call sheets and nine-frame analysis in order for the document to be presented onto our blog, we had to firstly embed the file into Slide Share, in which we then copied the embed code onto our post on blogger.

Our images that we took to incorporate into our digipak and advert were taken using a Canon es100d camera. The camera creates superb 18 megapixel images. It was crucial that we used our own imagery within our products so it made our final outcome personal and original.  The camera that we used to take our photographs on was of a very high standard and the quality that our pictures turned out to be like was brilliant.  We were able to manipulate the focusing of the camera along with being able to zoom in or out, depending on the type of shot we were wanting to create in each photograph. We set the camera settings to auto, which allowed the flash to go off if it was necessary or not. Luckily all of our images came out perfect, so we didn’t have to organize an alternative date to re-shoot, due to this we know that our photo-shoot was successful.

Facebook, the online social networking service, provided us with easy access to Facebook messenger which allowed us to contact our Artist – Olivia Shotton, in order to organize meetings to discuss what days filming would take place, along with the photo-shoot and also times which we would start and finish, all of this information was presented into a call sheet. We also used this social networking site to contact Ellie Gouldings record label ‘Polydor’ to request for permission of usage of her song within our music video, as we could not find Polydor’s account when searching for them on another online social networking site – ‘Twitter’.

Our Iphone camera's proved to be a useful resource too as it enabled us to capture stuff on the go such as, recce shots when we first when to visit our location to see if it was suitable to film. Also when we came across equipments faults, like when the tripod was broken when we were about to set it up on the day of our filming. We were able to capture this problem and explain in our portfolio some of the difficulties we came across during filming. As well as them two points that I've outlined above, our Iphone's also enabled us to contact Ellie Gouldings record label 'Poyldor' as we used Facebook Messenger, which is an app on Iphone. Our phones were also used to allow to communicate also between ourselves, whether that was organizing times to film or if we had to reschedule.

Although we have not used Glogster within our portfolio so far, we hope to use it to organize our portfolio together. Glogster is a social network that allows users to create interactive posters or glogs. It looks like a poster, but viewers can interact with the content.

Final Cut was used within our A2 portfolio because it provided us with one of the most professional pieces of editing software to be found on a Mac. The high quality of editing techniques made the process of editing our footage more fast, precise, skilled and qualified. The variety of techniques that were available to us in Final Cut were brilliant, overall it made our video more visually effective and specialized to fit into our chosen genre, relating to our song choice and it portrayed our individual star image that we were trying to create. Final Cut allowed us to basically drag the clips into the timeline. We were then able to arrange our clips into various sizes and positions, which allowed us to create our song narrative. Final Cut is good as it allows many audios and video tracks. When it came to matching the lip sync with the audio this was difficult as we wanted to get a professional finish, to make sure this happened when filming we used loud speakers, so the sound would be easily heard when the artist was performing. This made it a lot easier to match the sound waves from the visual video to the audio track. If we didn't do this we dont think that we would of got the finish that we have ended up with.

On final cut there are many video filters which were available to us, but we wanted something sepia or an old film effect to get our narrative across, that our artist was looking back on her relationship. After searching the internet we found a downloadable effect, which we thought was perfect. This effect is called CGM Aged Film LE. When using this effect we had to choose a suitable colour, saturation, variation of the grains and trapped hair to successfully create the effect that we wanted. To do this we had to take a photograph of the settings in which we liked, and replica this into every clip. As seen on the video some of the clips look like they have a different effect, this is not the case its just the lightning of the actual clip, unfortunelty this cant be changed.

In our video we used a recurring transition throughout our clips, the effect we used was Additive Dissolve. This was effective and wasn't too choppy, as some others seemed to be. This complimented the narrative of the video very well. We added the artist's name and song title at the start of the video, we used a text called Zapfino, this follows the recurring theme on all of our products. When dropping our brand logo into Final Cut, we didn't just want it to stand still, so we used Motion Key Frames, which allowed us to zoom in on our logo.

We decided to use Photoshop to create our ancillary texts because it is considered to be the best photo manipulation software. This software offered a number of professional and creative features along with tools, which allowed us to enhance our imagery to make it more visually effective. We changed the saturation and brightness, in order for our texts to relate well with our music video. Our theme is based upon purely nature, so we enhanced nature imagery in order for it to stand out, e.g. changing the saturation of the leaves and tree's. We used colour tools in order to change the artist's eyes, which instantly made our product visually effective. The ability to use layers in Photoshop was very useful, by having every element on a different layer, this allowed us to be able to go back and correct mistakes and change things until we got the perfect design that fit our theme perfectly. The text was created by simply selecting the text tool 'T' in which we selected a recurring font which had been used within our music video, as we wanted to use the same throughout. Within our ancillary texts, we have used black and white colours, the reason for this is because by just using the black colour, not only did the text seem very plain, but also the text didn't seem noticeable, it made the font looked blurred and hard to read.