Q4 - Joe/Mark

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

There wasnt a wide variety of technology available to us for the creation of our media product but we made use of what we had over the course of the term.

The primary technology we used to research our product was the internet. We obtained the majority of our information from here and also used it to present the information in the form of the blog. This is more effective than using books or magazines because it can be regularly updated; it’s important to keep with the times. For example: we used YouTube to find the most popular videos of the year so that we could look at the conventions of the mainstream video; and also used it to find examples that we could take inspiration from.

We used a digital video to camera in the planning of our video by creating a storyboard and then filming it, using the editing package Final Cut to edit the images together into a video format for easier viewing. A problem of this is that it was time-consuming to edit the images together; time that could perhaps have been better spent conducting more through research.

The most obvious technology we used in the construction of our music video was of course the digital video camera. Unfortunately the cameras were fairly basic and so high-quality pictures couldn’t be achieved, but they did the job and actually were practical to use in the club scenes because they were easier to maneuver and less likely to be damaged. We didn’t actually make use of a tripod for many of the scenes in the video because we wanted to make it look a bit more jerky and quick to raise the pace. When we did use the tripod, it helped us develop our camerawork skills such as panning smoothly, and when we didn’t we were able to practice holding a camera steadily in our hands and shooting from interesting angles. We edited the video using Final Cut which we enjoyed because we were able to add interesting transitions and visual effects, such as the filter on the shots in the club scene or the negative effect on the shots of the druggie. We were also able to vary the length of the shots and rearrange them into an order we were happy with. For the ancillaries we used PhotoShop Express, which is a good program to use because it allows you to manipulate images in obscure ways, such as the lighting effect in the top right corner of the CD cover, but is also quite difficult to use and takes an incredibly long time to master if you’re not sure what you’re doing.