Question 4

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Question Four

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

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During the initial planning stages of my products, I used numerous new media

technologies in order to allow myself the best outcome and most successful

products that could clearly adhere to and challenge conventions of the rock/indie

genre.

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SPOTIFY

+When I began my research and planning, thefirst thing I did was to use a platform called Spotify.

Spotify is a commercial music streaming service supported by visual and radio-style advertising which on which music can be browsed by artist, album, record label, genre or playlist as well as by direct searches, and also allows the user to search for top rated music in the UK, USA and several other countries. I pay £5 a month to receive this and it allows me unlimited access to this free music, as well as suggesting related songs and artists depending on my previous choices.

+ Spotify allows you to search for artists and songs.

It is heavily personalised and gives the listener a pre-selected list of songs.

The inclusion of visuals and related artists allows for a much more in depth experience while finding a suitable song.

Includes a choice of location.

+I looked through hundreds of artists and songs to find a suitable one for my music video, and changed my mind regarding the genre numerous times due to the suggested artists and the numerous ideas that I had for each possibly adherence and challenge to the theories I had learnt about.

After much deliberation, I settled on the song ‘Radioactive’ by Imagine Dragons.

I felt the song itself was interesting enough to create a music video to, and the visuals that were included on Spotify inspired me to go about my own work in a certain manner that I also felt I would be comfortable with.

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BLOGGER

+Another very important medium that I used was a website called Blogger, which is a website used for creating blogs of all different sorts, including wedding blogs, fashion blogs, movie-review blogs and in my case, my Media A2 Advanced Production blog.

This website allowed me to document all of my work in a single place, with an easily accessible layout and understanding of how to find and demonstrate my progress over the last two years.

It describes itself as “an easy, powerful way to share your story” and I believe that it lives up to this.

+Blogger allows you to customise your own working space and control your posting, as well as who is able to see what you post.

+I found that Blogger was surprisingly easy to navigate and use throughout the entirety of the time I needed it, which was something that made my work significantly easier.

To view my posts, I would simply have to click on a drop down menu and everything would be there, labeled neatly and simple to create new posts or edit those that I had already done.

+ Not only was I able to post my work into one safe, secure and easy to access place, I was also able to see who had viewed my work to the point where I could see what country the user lived in, their gender and even their age bracket.

This was incredibly helpful in terms of my audience research because it allowed me to see what sort of target audience were looking at my research as well as at my products.

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FINAL CUT EXPRESS

+I used Final Cut Express as a means of editing my music video, and this played a vital role in my work throughout the entire process.

Final Cut allowed me to use numerous techniques and edit my work in a manner that reached a professional standard, as well as being basic enough for a first time user to understand without trouble.

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+Initially, I found that Final Cut Express was somewhat difficult to use but after some time experimenting with rough cuts of my music video, I was able to develop my understanding.

In using Final Cut Express, I was capable of the following things and used them to the greatest (and most appropriate) extent:

Importing video clips, audio and images.

Applying numerous video effects and transitions.

Splicing video footage.

Overlaying video clips, audio and images.

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YOUTUBE

+This was perhaps the most well known inclusion, as YouTube is famous for its hosting and viral abilities.

I used YouTube mostly in the audience feedback stages, to upload my work and receive comments from anyone with an account that was not restrictive in any way.

This, along with my use of Facebook, allowed me to gain understanding of what people wanted to see in my music video.

I did a similar thing with my ancillary products, although I posted these onto Facebook for feedback due to them being images and not video based.

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I was also able to use this website as means of gaining some inspiration during the planning stages of my product as well as establishing the codes and conventions of the rock/indie genre.

I looked at numerous music videos, some of those being the music videos that related to songs I had chosen from Spotify, and took several examples from numerous videos that adhered to my own initial ideas.

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FIREWORKS

+This is the software I used to create my digipak and my magazine posters.

Fireworks is advanced software that is similar to Photoshop, and while it is not at a beginners level, I found that the professional tools it enabled me to use helped me to create the best ancillary products I could have done at my current stage.

The software enabled me to manipulate images in terms of extracting colours and backgrounds, adding transparent layers and titling my work.

The proficiency of this software enabled me to create products that seemed authentic, as opposed to rushed or poorly made.

+I was able to use this software to do everything that I wanted to do and take what I wanted to take from my rough mock-ups of the ancillary products.

Due to the user-friendly nature of the software, I was also able to edit my work easily when it came to making changes dependant on my audience feedback.

Many of the tools involved helped my progress, such as:

properly blurring colours:

Creating the effect of the light bulb in my final magazine advert.

Creating the image of a bright streetlamp in the darkness for my digipak front cover.

+Example of progress with Fireworks.

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COMMON WEBSITES

+As well as software, I would not have been able to create my products without the use of common and often over-looked websites that have been made available to me via Web 2.0. as part of an initiative to make the internet user-friendly within the post-traditional society that I live in.

These websites played a critical part in the research and planning of my product, as well as the gathering of audience feedback.

+FACEBOOK

With Facebook, I was able to send messages and status’ to select people and ask them what they thought of my work.

I could also embed my music video and ancillary products onto the website, which enabled me to receive more focussed feedback.

As well as this, I was able to use Facebook to look at the pages relating to my chosen artist, which helped me to understand their target audience and the demographic they actually had – through the number of ‘likes’ and the visual links to those users.

+People have even gone as far as creating tribute pages for this band.

This allowed me to see what sort of people liked the band and thus what their target audience/demographic was.

+IMAGINEDRAGONS.COM

This was one of the most important websites I went on to gather information about the band for my research and planning, to ensure that I understood the genre I was choosing.

It also helped me in terms of lyric interpretation, and I was able to see what artistic style (experimental) that they conventionally followed in order to apply it to my own.

Shot from Imagine Dragons music video.

Shots from mine, same colour changes and urban environment.

+FOTOFLEXER

This is a website that is very similar to Fireworks in a lot of ways.

It allows the user to edit photos at a beginners level, and I found that this was ideal for the initial creation and drafting of my ancillary products as I was able to use the website to change and edit my drafts until I had a template that I felt was good enough to be used in the final design.

+END.