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

• For our music video we used a range of different technologies, for different parts of the production. The blog was very useful, as it enables us to see each others work, and what the other people in the group are thinking, we could use the blog to brainstorm ideas, and comment on the groups work.



• These things allowed us to collaboratively produce an idea and concept for our music video, and also post research or links that we thought would be useful to the video.



• We were able to post new ideas for the concept of the video or new shot ideas on the blog, allowing us to have up to date ideas, and seeing how our ideas develop. This was key in the planning of our video and the development of it.



• Another aspect of Web 2.0 we used was Survey Monkey; we used to carry out our first part of the audience research. Survey Monkey is a website which allows people to create a questionnaire online, and invite people to complete it.



• This was very useful as it was easy to create a questionnaire, and was also easy for people to fill out, as it was all done on the Internet. Another useful thing about Survey Monkey was that you could easily access results from the surveys, and create graphs and tables from them.



• For the filming, we used HD cameras, these were very good, and as the picture quality was high, which gave our video a better look. However, we did experience some problems with the cameras, which limited our filming on two occasions, due to a broken battery and a full memory card.



• These problems meant that we had to change our camera, as it was not working, and restricting our filming time. After we changed the camera to a different one, we had no further problems.



• In post-production we used Adobe Premiere 8.0 to edit our music video, which allowed us to use effects on some shots, and cut the footage up, so that it looked like a music video.



• Throughout the editing of our video (using premiere), we used the time stretch tool, because for a lot of sequences we needed to speed up the time or reverse the clip backwards.



• Below shows how we used time stretch to create this effect.

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  The tool was very effective as it enabled us to get a really stylistic feel to the video, and gave us a brilliant start to the music video. We also used the time stretch tool for the parts in the video where the video rewinds or goes backwards, this worked as it allowed us to change the storyline easily and fit in other parts of the footage that we filmed. E.g. when the video rewinds to the sequence in the snow.
  
  
  

• Another effect we used in Premiere was the video merge; we used this to over-lay the pictures of the lead singer as a child on the video. This allowed us to remove the desk which we dropped the photos onto, without removing the pictures.

• For our print production we used Adobe Photoshop, which we could use to create our digipak and adverts.



• In my print work I used a still from the music video, I did this by exporting a freeze frame from the video, then putting this in Photoshop, and I then cut out the figure of the lead singer by using the magnetic lasso tool. I used different effects on the figure in the bottom left, and created 4 layers of the figure all using a different effects. I distorted the images of the figure by using filters including, accented edges, coloured pencil, film grain, paint daubs and angled strokes.



• On all the images of the figure I used a drop shadow, to create the dark shadow behind the figure. I also used a drop shadow to create the white glow on other side of the figures.