Question 4

Daniella Lawrence Question 4A2 Media production

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

and evaluation stages?

During the construction of our media product, we were given the chance to use a

variety of different technologies and were taught how to make use of different

techniques such as split screen and apply them to our video. I found that learning

these techniques were very useful as it has made a big difference to the quality of my

production. Technologies such as Adobe Premiere Pro allow you to make your own

music video, making them less time consuming but still very professional.

Before actually creating our production we

were given the opportunity to create an

animatic using Windows Movie Maker on our

laptops. We made our story board and took

pictures of the shots. We then uploaded them

onto the computer so we could rearrange them

in an order that we would want our production

to be. This enabled us to achieve an understanding of how our production would be

and allowed us to experiment with transitions and effects that we might want to use.

This is an effective technique as it gives you a plan of what to do when you come to

editing the real production.

Throughout the course of making our music video we

have been using a blog as our production diary to show

how we have been developing our ideas and how the

production was beginning to take place. It also helped in

keeping track of where we were going with our production.

BlogSpot is an online site that enables you to create and

personalise your own blog were you can post information

on your production, photos and videos. This is an effective site as it is able to keep a

record of production of our music video; BlogSpot has been equally useful in the

sense that we can upload research and cases studies.

Daniella Lawrence Question 4A2 Media production

The internet has been great use to us throughout the production of our music video as

it has enabled us to look for our artists and try to contact them through there MySpace

page or email. This has been extremely important as we wanted to try and gain

permission from our artist before using their song for copyright reasons. Such

technologies have developed extremely of the years as there were no such equipment

that could help in the production of a video. Many years ago editors would have to

hand make their videos by cutting the film reels from the camera by hand and gluing

the clips wanted together as they were limited on the technologies we are lucky to

have today, e.g. editing software such as Adobe Premiere Pro. New media

technologies that we are able to use today are very effective as they allow you to

make multiple videos in a shorter amount of time than in the old days. It has opened

doors to independent artists where they can now make their own videos at low costs.

When filming our music video we were given the opportunity to

use two cameras to film with, one being a normal hand held and

the other being a HD hand held camera. We took this opportunity

as we would then be able to film two different shots at the same

time, instead of repeating the shot to film at different angles. This

also enabled us to use a wide variety of shots in a smaller amount of time. We also

thought that this would be helpful in case we wanted to experiment and place two

pieces of footage on top of each other within the production.

Whilst creating a production you have to ensure that

you use a variety of camera techniques such as panning,

zoom, close-up’s, long-shot’s, mid-shot’s as it provides

variety and develops the representation. For example,

panning was something we used within our production

as we wanted to highlight how we merged an urban

Daniella Lawrence Question 4A2 Media production

area with an extremely glamorous artist and that was one way we tried to challenge

the conventions of the genre. Having a variety of shots within a production keeps it

interesting and the shots you use tend to create meaning to what you are filming.

Close-ups were something that was often used in our production as it is a key feature

of music videos as they show facial expression and create meaning for the viewer.

Adobe premiere is the software we used for the editing of our production, it enabled

us to take clips from the footage we filmed and helped us turn them into our final

production. The software enabled us to select our clips, crop, edit or even modify

them. In short the Adobe Premiere Pro software is sophisticated enough that it nearly

gives you total control of changing the clips to the way you want them to be. For

example, I wanted to change some of my clips to monochromes as I felt it would be

more effective for the viewer. This was a

very exciting experience as I managed to

understand how media products are truly

manufactured and it made me applaud the

wide opportunities of such technologies. I

have added effects such as making some

of the clips monochrome as I felt it would

give a twist to the video and make it more

appealing to the audience. On this

software I was also able to make some of my clips slightly darker by changing the

contrast and brightness of the clips as I felt they were a little too light and didn’t fit

with the rest of the video.

Overall, such technologies have changes the way music video can now be produced,

providing more control over what you can do, such as adding colour effects and

Daniella Lawrence Question 4A2 Media production

transitions. They enable people to apply their ideas onto their videos, creating

effective videos for their audiences.