How Did You Use New Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

EVALUATIONQUESTION 4

HOW DID YOU USE NEW M EDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION

AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

Chris Joyce

ResearchResearch was definitely the easiest part of the whole process for us. We love watching music videos, listening to music and finding out what goes on behind the scenes, so this was basically just a big fun adventure for me and Matt. I think it was even easier for me because I’m a gigantic fan of indie/rock music and we knew we wanted to use an indie/rock song. This was basically a deeper look at the bands and music I love. Some of these are shown below;

ResearchYoutube is a website that has taken the whole of the media by storm. Its created a whole new way of “rating” videos and listening to anything from soundtracks to tutorial videos. It was extremely useful in viewing Indie Music Videos and helped us decide what sort of clothing to wear in the video, what makes a successful video and what sort of song to use for the ideas we had.

Wikpedia appears to be the centre for all information on the internet. If you need to know the names of band members, albums, filmographys, timelines of events, and other such knowledge, wikipedia is the place to find it. It helped us to find all of this and enabled to decide when making some crucial decisions.

Google was another internet site that helped us greatly, more specifically “google images” helped us the most. Being able to find pictures meant that we could document our findings to a better standard, allowing us to compare and contrast much of the information we needed when deciding upon features of our video.

Kasabian . . . <3As you’ve no doubt already read about, the band Kasabian were a huge influence on us during the research process. We were obsessed with the ‘Vlad the Impaler’ video and this was a big decider in what we were going to do in our video. Youtube and Itunes helped us view and listen to Kasabian. THANK YOU KASABIAN!

ResearchAfter having a vague idea in our heads of what we wanted to do, we needed to find an upbeat song that suited it. In order to do this, we went on unsigned.com. This is a site which people can sign up to in order to present their music, and this is where we found the perfect song; 1984 – Green Eyed Monster. MySpace helped us contact the band, and played a part in this section of our video production too.

PlanningAfter we had found the song, we could start planning our video. There are a couple of new media technologies that helped us immensely when doing this;

Final Cut Express Still Cameras

Final cut allowed us to create a lip-sync video, which allowed us to find out if the song we had chosen was too fast or if in fact either of us was capable of doing it.

This software has really grown on me and is the best editing software that I,

personally, have ever used.

Still camera’s allowed us to take pictures of what we were doing, for example, the pictures we took when we were out shopping for costumes or when we were filming Matt’s character catwalk. This coupled with ‘Blogger’ helped us document our work to a much better standard.

PlanningDuring planning we decided to use some shots similar to those in other music videos; below are some examples of Kasabian shots which we tried to re-create;

ConstructionWe had a great time during construction and have both recently said that we actually miss going out and filming on a whim because one of us has had an epiphany. During construction we used an HD CAMERA which made our footage clearer and of a better standard than cameras we had previously used.

The construction process also includes editing, during which we used the new FINAL CUT EXPRESS software and LIVETYPE to piece together our video and create titles. We’re convinced that without this software and without the IMAC COMPUTERS we would have had a much harder time during the editing process.

On the next slide are some pictures of Final Cut Express, Livetype and the IMac computers we have used over the

course of the project.

ConstructionIn the construction of our ancillary products, the Digipak and the advert, we used a couple of other programs. These were ‘Picnik.com’ and ‘Photoshop’. These are both image editing programs and were extremely useful in the production of both of our ancillary products.

PhotoShop Picnik.com

PhotoShopPhotoshop is perhaps the hardest and most complicated software I have ever used in my life, but I’ve never been happier using it. Its amazing. You can do anything, and when I say anything, I mean anything. You can enhance images, make people fatter, skinnier, younger, older, cut hair or even put someone on the moon. Tools include; blur, crop, magnify, smudge, history tool and removal tool. It was the program that helped us create the digipak, taking images created on paint and giving them depth and clarity so as they could be used on the digipak. I. Love. Photoshop.

PICNIK.COMPicnik.com is what we used to create the advert. It is a great website with plenty of features that enable a user to manipulate images. It enabled us to tint green, give the staggered zoom effect and add text with a range of fonts. We edited in the digipak picture with photoshop on our advert, but this program did all the rest. A great website for simple image manipulation and its on the up, getting increasingly popular among younger generations.

EvaluationNew media technologies that helped me in the evaluation process are;

•Slideshare.net• Surveymonkey.com

• Microsoft PowerPoint• Wordle.net

Each of these has helped me with a different aspect of the evaluation process.Slideshare has helped me put my presentations onto my blog on blogger.com. Surveymonkey helped me to gather results on the music video. Microsoft powerpoint combined with slideshare to interact with my blog and wordle has provided me with a different way of presenting information.