Evaluation Question 4 - Alex

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

When doing the research, planning, construction and evaluation, I used a lot of new media technologies. Such technologies included programmes like Final cut, Garage band and Photoshop.  Overall, the main research was done through the internet and search engines. This helped us find everything we needed to know about our chosen music genre and the conventions that are associated with it. This helped us find videos on YouTube of typical ‘House music’ related videos to base our initial ideas on.

With video production, we used a SANYO HD camera and tripod to keep our shots steady and still. This had a safe set up with pan and tilt controls. We were very organised through our shooting stage as we had planned thoroughly exactly what we wanted. Most of our camera shots were done using the tripod so it wouldn’t look shaky on film and which ultimately makes it look more professional. We also used it as a handheld camera at some points to fit the conventions of the genre. We found that some of our shots did come out shaky or blurry and so these were resolved by converting the clip into a Quicktime still image. By using a HD camera I think that this enhanced our footage in making it look professional and not so much a ‘typical student film’.

For our editing we used Apples Final Cut Express, Adobe Photoshop and Apples Garage band. Luckily these were provided along with the Macs in school which gave us the best opportunity of making a good film. As a beginner of using these programmes I think we coped extremely well. We learned how to add effects to our filming such as making our whole film black and white by desaturating it as a whole when doing our final pieces of editing.

We added speed into our clips, either speeding them up or putting them into slow motion.  We also learned to reverse our clips for example someone walking backwards instead of them originally walking forwards. We used this a few times as it turned out to be a good effect in our music video.

We learned to use such feature by using tutorial clips on YouTube. When using such a powerful website such as YouTube you can find almost anything. So we searched how to use slow motion effects, speed effects and split screen effects. They were very efficient and easy to do once we got the hang of them. 

The split screen effect looks so effective to do but we didn't know how to construct it. So again, we used another YouTube tutorial to help us. Once we got the hang of using the effects they became much simpler and we gradually got faster in doing so. Also, when doing effects on our video clips we had to make new tabs not to get confused with the rest of the video. This came in handy as it didn't mess up the sequence we had already made and gave us a chance to play around with the different effects that Final Cut had to offer.

Another effect we used a few times was subtitles. We added these when our characters in the video had a piece of silent dialogue which came in useful for the audience. This was a tricky concept at first as we had to make new subtitles for each cut clip we wanted to use. Once we had completed that we had to then go back and choose fonts, colours and sizes we wanted which ultimately made it a longer process when doing so. 

First we had to download our track from Sound Cloud, which is a Web 2.0 website that allows music to be created, recorded and shared on line. I also found myself having to cut the original song from 7 minutes down to 3 minutes using Garage band to make it acceptable to use for our music video. The whole song is instrumental so it wasn't cutting out any major parts. This was a tricky task but I believe that it was completed well and the cuts of music tend to seem unrecognisable to somebody who doesn’t know. Garage band is a very modern way of making music and would be something I would highly recommend in using.

The editing process as a whole was a challenge as we didn’t know how our video would turn out but without these programmes being available then our video wouldn’t have been produced to a high quality and wouldn’t have looked particularly good.

When making our digipak and magazine advert we used a Nikon D40 digital stills camera to take our pictures and then edit it using Photoshop. 

I found that I learned to use Photoshop as I went along. This was in a trial and error type way of working. For example, I would use the tools to try to change a colour of a certain part and by just trying different tools I found the one I needed and learnt from there. I had to try to change a lot of the pictures to black and white and as seen on the digipak and magazine advert Photoshop was used in both occasions. 

Blogger and wix.com have been used to provide all our research, planning and construction work to show our progress in stages and is a place to present our evaluation interactively.

Please visit my multimedia evaluation on Wix.

http://www.wix.com/guazzellialex/eval