Evaluation: Part IV

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

We used the blogging site called 'Blogger' for our blog, this is quite a difficult site to use as it is quite slow and takes a long period of time to upload a video to the site, this is why many YouTube videos are embedded into our blog. Although it's easy to navigate there way around the site, but hard to find other blogs from searching. Another Website we used was YouTube, this was a useful reference tool; as we got our inspiration from watching other music videos on the site, as well as finding tutorials of how to use some of the other technology we've used for example: we used a tutorial of who to get a blood splatter on the camera and the muzzle flash by downloading footage and integrating it into the original music video.

We Filmed on a Sony Handicam, this was a grainy and poor quality clarity, we would've been  better off using a SLR camera that uses video; it's HD quality and had the capability of using depth of field which make the picture look more cinematic and and more tension to the scene, however we had done well with the quality we were given, although the HD SLR would've made it look more professional. We had to shoot with having playback as there was a risk of recording over the film and loosing material and wasting time. The advantage of doing a music video is that you don't need spoken word as the microphone on the Sony Handicam is poor and crackly which would've effected the film as taken away from it. To get the camera steady we used a tripod, the tripod was a good tool as it made the shots look more professional by making it steady. We also were going to use a fish eye cover for the camera for the police at the door to make it look like as if it the audience were looking through a peep hole, but we forgot to use it. We uploaded it through a firewire as this is faster than a normal USB. I also used my iPhone to record minual videos such as the interviews and the storyboard explained. It's easy to use and download to the computer and other people can use it as they used to the 'iPod/iPhone lay out as they would've used one in the past.

For the post-production we used Apple Mac's to edit the music video as these are more reliable than PC's and have better resualation than a PC, MAC's are specialised in using design, photo and video software where as PC's are mostly for documents. On the Mac we used the video editing software Imovie as this was the only software available and was the easiest to use from previous experiences. We used the 09' version which was effective put restrained us as you can only do limited tasks on the software. However the most complicated task we needed to do was inserting the muzzel flash and blood splatter which were CGI. Also for editing the pictures for the ancillary task I used Photoshop Element 4.0; this is a very good software to use as i'm very experienced in using this, and it gives you creative freedom as you can do many things on the programme to get an effective finish.