Media A2 Evaluation Q.4

4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages
When searching for our chosen song for our music promo we were told to use the website www.unsigned.com. This is because the website gives you a list of unsigned songs that can be used for the music promo because we are not allowed to use songs that are already signed due to copyright. We came across our chosen song through You Tube though. This happened when we found a few songs on the unsigned website but one day some of our group members accidentally found a good unsigned song when typing in Glam Rock unsigned songs into You Tube. The song Rock Pride was very impressive so we got in contact with the band B.I.T.E and were happy to lend us their song as long as we mentioned them when the video was ready to be shared on you tube. The conversation to the band can be found below.

When conducting research for our promotional package, You Tube was very helpful in helping us find good example videos of successful music promos. This applies especially to videos within the Glam Rock genre. What You Tube helped with the most was in finding the song we used for our promo. You Tube can also allow us to take stills from the same genre videos and compare them with ours to see if we have lived up to their standards.

When constructing our 3 media texts we used many different types of technology. For our music promo we used an Apple software called Final Cut Pro on an Apple MAC for editing. On our prelim music promo we originally used i movie but found out that this new software was more responsive, had more features and more technologies. A picture of the software can be shown below, which shows a part of our music promo on it.

For the digipak and magazine advert we used the computer software called Photo shop as this allowed us to make the two ancillary tasks as creative as possible with all the different colours and layouts. The software allowed for easy and smooth editing of the pictures we put together to achieve the designs.  

There are several skills which I have learnt through the filming of our music promo. This is mainly because I was in charge of filming with the cameras. The main thing I learnt from using the cameras was how many different and creative shots I could introduce to the music promo to avoid the effect of tedium. In the promo we wanted to make sure that most of the shots if not all of them had a different camera angle. This is because the song was three minutes and fifty eight seconds long so we did not want people to get bored with the same camera shots over again.

There are also lots of skills I have learnt through the editing process that was not known to me before. For example there was a blade feature icon that we used to split up the clips of footage. This helped with transitions that showed shots and then the same shot after that one. We used this in the last jump off the stage as we cut the jump section up four times in order to put four separate images of the band members in together to get a good mix of all the band members in order to finish off the song in a good climax.  

On the first shoot day for filming our music promo we encountered a few problems that convinced us to conduct a second day of filming. This is because most of the first day’s footage was out of focus. This was due to the cameras not having the right adjustments on the auto focus. We also noticed a distinct difference between Jamie’s camera and Rhys’s camera. We noticed that the footage was coming out a little differently and Jamie’s was a bit clearer than Rhys’s. This led us to come to the decision of only using Jamie’s camera to one keep the footage all the same and two to use the camera which had the better focus. On the second day we had to change the auto focus to manual focus just to get a little bit sharper picture. We also had to change two of the band members for the second day so this meant that most of the first day footage was nearly useless. On the second day though we stuck to a more accurate schedule of shots and got some really impressive footage. The shot schedule is shown below along with some bad footage of the first shoot day. 

 

The Internet is a very useful tool as it has helped us to exhibit our video over the world. For example once downloading the video onto You Tube, we then shared it with Facebook to allow others around the world to watch it. Facebook is a good way to show everybody what we have created. Publicising the video online is the best way to exhibit a video as nearly everyone has computers, i Pods or any other devices that connect to the Internet. People can then either follow the link to the You Tube video or just watch it on the social networking site.

 You Tube is a website which has a good way to see feedback on your videos. For example the public can like, dislike and comment on videos to express their feedback and view on the video. This is why our prelim music video was so successful.

Blogger is a website which we use to post our media work on. I have been using blogger for nearly two years and it is an easy way to organise your work. On blogger the work I produce is available to the world. Blogger will allow me to put text, images, videos and more onto my blog to help include more types of technological features. The teachers will mark my work via blogger but the website will also allow me to see the amount of views on my blog as you can see below.

As you can see so far my new blog for this year has picked up 2107 page views and this increase from last year’s blog is probably due to the higher standard of work I have produced.