Top Hat Productions: Sophia Bendo Media Evaluation

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

Research

New media technologies were central during each stage of creating the media product. Web 2.0 technology was instrumental throughout the entire process. During the research stage, I relied heavily on the Internet search engine Google in order to explore different genres of music. It was essential that we chose an appropriate genre as this could potentially affect the narrative format and structure of the media product, for example if our genre had been Rock music, it would be appropriate to observe the established music video forms and conventions of this genre with a performance based video. Our chosen genre was House music and we used the websites YouTube.com and Soundcloud.com in order to find songs we liked and videos which influenced and inspired our own media product.

Planning

During the planning process we used Apple’s Final Cut Express for the pre production and pre visualisation of our media product. We used Final Cut to develop an animated storyboard of our script; using pictures we had taken with a Nikon D40 digital stills camera. These pictures were then edited to create a rough storyboard for our final product. YouTube and the website Blogger.com were also new media technologies that we used frequently during this stage, mainly to upload pictures of our work as it progressed. We also created a YouTube channel; this facilitated uploading videos such as our rough cut and storyboards.

We also created powerpoints in order to canvas our key ideas to classmates and gain their feedback. Moodboards, storyboards, visual timelines were instrumental in helping us to visualise our ideas and get a rough idea of what the video would look like. Without these visual aids we would have struggled when filming.

Construction

In the construction stage, we used a Sanyo HD camera and tripod with pan and tilt controls to shoot our media product. The filming process was relatively stress free as we had been very organised with our shot lists, props and location. However, we found that we didn’t have enough footage so we had to complete an extra day of filming. Also, we planned to create a montage of still images in our video. This was difficult as the first time; the pictures did not save on the school’s camera and the second time, they were out of focus and shaky so we had to use QuickTime converter to convert them into high quality, still images.

FinalCut Express was also used to edit the media product. It was mostly a straight forward process, however it took some research and the help of YouTube tutorials to learn how to create effects such as split screens, adding in subtitles, slow motion and colour desaturation.

We also used GarageBand to edit the song, it was too long and required cutting. This was stressful as we needed to edit the song smoothly and get the timing of the cuts spot on otherwise the song would jump, this was particularly important as several key scenes in the video are edited directly in synch to the music, if the timings were not correct then this would affect the pace of the music video.

In order to create the magazine advert and Digipak, I used Adobe Photoshop. Initially, I struggled with this as I was not familliar with the software and I didn't understand how the layers worked. However, once I familiarised myself with how it worked, I was able to use Photoshop confidently and produce an effective magazine advert and Digipak.