Monday, 10 December 2012

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


Research & Planning 

During the research stage I used technologies like Google maps to help scout out venues for our main shoot we were looking for an industrial location to give the video a rushed look , so the video would appear to have a group of people who have randomly broken into a building and started a party. We se3lected locations that were close to Stapleford to allow easy access for our friends to travel to them, from this information we travelled to the various venues to assess the area, we then contacted the venue managers to haggle on a price for a night’s hire. In the end we scouted out a church in the Sandiacre area which we managed to get for an affordable price.
To cast enough actors for the party scene we started a group on Facebook and invited groups to attend the shoot. This allowed us to roughly gauge how many would attend as the shoot was set as an event so invited people could reply “attending, maybe or not attending”. Unfortunately, we did not get the attendance we expected from the Facebook replies. I think this is down to the way Facebook is used, as mostly people accept events without reading what the event is.
In the research stage I used multimedia sites like YouTube to provide me with existing dance music videos, I search and selected a track which I was familiar with, from this I then followed the suggestions made by YouTube, which I could then analyze to find the common conventions of the genre and to establish the range of shot and editing techniques used during the production. I used this information to aid me in the planning and construction of my media project. I also used Google to find previous ancillary texts of artists by searching for artists I listen to and have a relevance to my genre, I narrowed the search by using key words like “digipak” to also allow me to gather ideas and common conventions to also aid in the construction of my own ancillary texts .
Construction – 

During the various film shoots we used a Canon 550d DSLR camera and a Sony XDCAM EXPMW-EX1 camera. We used the Sony for the longer shoots as we could produce a better shot in the low light levels that we encountered at East Midlands Airport. The Sony also allowed us to slow the frame rate down to capture the sun set in a shorter clip to allow the track to be sped up without distortion (which would occur with a normal frame rate).
We then used the Canon for recording on the Nottingham shoot as the camera is more lightweight but also produces high quality HD footage which would pair up well to the footage recorded on the Sony. Using the Canon on the Nottingham shoot allowed us to be more versatile with the shots as we did not need to worry about mass amounts of equipment, which is associated with the Sony camera.
During construction we needed to navigate to various locations, for this we used the maps app on the iPhone; we also used the iPhone to access the internet to allow us to view the East Midlands Airport website to allow us to be able to be setup and ready on time, as the weather was cold hence we did not want to leave the equipment out.  Phones played a major part in the construction allowing us to be in contact with each other via phone calls and email to arrange shoots and to allow us to make contact with the school’s technical team to arrange meeting places for shoots and schedules.  
During editing we used a program called Sony Vegas, as originally we worked on Adobe Premiere Pro but found the user interface complicated so referred to Sony Vegas as we have had previous experience with this program. This program was installed on Matt’s laptop, this allowed us to be flexible with the editing, allowing us to experiment with effects at home and put them in to practice when editing at school.
For the Digipak and Magazine Advert I used Adobe Photoshop, this program allowed me to add effects the images and edit the appearance which can be seen in the front and back images which are both identical, apart from the aeroplane being removed from the image (to achieve this effect I used the wand tool). I think by having the same image on the front and back it links the digipak and the video effectively, which creates a house style or brand image. The font used in the advert and digipak were both found on www.dafont.com, as the standard fonts on Photoshop I felt were not effective enough for an advert. Blow are the two videos showing how my ancillery texts were created in photoshop. 



































Evaluation 

For the evaluation I have used various forms of media, for question 1 we recorded a video to act like a director’s cut, which shows the video in the background with us making comments in the foreground to a camera. In other questions I used other forms of technology like the use of Prezis to give the audience a better experience when reading though my evaluative comments. This should keep the reader interested throughout. 



No comments:

Post a Comment