Evaluation Question 4

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

Firstly, in the construction stage I used multiple pieces of media technology in the construction stage of my music video project. In order to effectively research other digipaks and album covers I used powerpoint in order to make a presentation on an existing media product from a band, the 1975,  whose theme turned out to be similar to the artist we as a group created. Powerpoint was an easy and effective application which allowed me to clearly analyse aspects of the band's album covers and posters, which enabled us to take inspiration and therefore interpret them into our own piece. In addition to this, in the construction stage I also used Youtube to research into music videos to get an understanding of some of the codes and conventions used in music videos. Some were the artist usually looks directly into the camera, some lip syncing takes place and it also shares with me the importance of good locations which match the theme and genre of the song.

Furthermore, we used blogger.com in order to document our progress during the planning stage of the project, as well as during the construction stage. This allowed us to refer back to specific breakthroughs we had made and allow us to refer back to them, such as uploading the storyboards, which then we used final cut pro to transform the storyboards into an animatic. This gave us a base knowledge of how to use final cut pro and we could use these developed skills in the post production stage.

Also, during the production stage we used a Cannon camera to shoot our music video and take the pictures used in the the digipak and poster. We all became more familiar with the camera throughout the project and it was very useful and effective as we could use the necessary affects, such as focusing. Along with the camera, we also used lights when shooting for our digipak and poster and this was to allow us to have the necessary lighting to fight in with the theme of our artist and ancillary texts.

Finally, in the evaluation stage we have used Soundcloud to document our thoughts on the project answering one of the evaluation questions. We found this method very easy to use as you can record your answer and upload with not much hassle.