How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The technology we used throughout the course includes, a HD camera, a Mac G5 computer and macbook Pro Retinas with the programs on them such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. These pieces of software and hardware have influenced our project very heavily as they have enabled us to produce pieces of coursework to our best ability without the restriction of the quality of technology used. By using these we were able to create lots of effects such as editing the entire music video, by cutting the clips on Final Cut Pro which allowed us to cut to the beat and use different sections of footage whenever we wished to or thought it would best fit the song. If technology were not so advanced as it is now, we would have met met a series of problems such as:
- if not for new media technologies The special effects in our video from After Effects could not exist, there would be no such thing as colour correction of the clips or overlapping effects which creates a more interesting image int the music video to keep to the indie genre of our song. If this didn’t exist the result would be that our video would suffer in quality and technique. We wouldn’t have had any of layering or fading effects making the base of the video very boring to watch by the audience.
- Without social networking such as Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter many of us would not have been able to post the surveys that we made at the beginning of the course that would help us decide what people thought would best suit our indie genre of song. If we didn’t have these sites, the variety of people that our survey would go to, would be limited as it would have to be sent by email or physically presented to people, which would have taken much longer and wouldn’t have got such as good result as using a social media site. We would also have had to advertise our music video using posters or leaflets in order for people to see it. Producing these would cost money where as advertising online is completely free and is an easy way to quickly communicate with your friends as it would also be easily spread throughout the internet, whereas if posters were made they would only be seen in the area in which you placed them in. Also by being our friends, they would be more likely to partake in helping distribute and making the videos by liking them or sharing them on social networks or by tweeting links to the videos on twitter.
- If we didn’t have Final Cut we would have to use the ‘crash editing’ technique. You do this by using two tapes and cutting from these instead, completely skipping the use of editing programs which would make life a lot more difficult and would make the video less effective as we wouldn’t be able to create overlays and effects on the footage. We would also have to me a lot more selective with our filming as we wouldn’t be able to use all of the footage due to the amount of work that would have to go into cutting the film manually, meaning we could miss some of the better, more important footage.
- The HD cameras are also much more effective than the DV cameras. They produce a much higher quality of video improving the overall look as they can focus on multiple or singular objects increasing the depth of field. Using DV cameras produces a much more grainy image quality. Also HD cameras, such as cannon allow you to change the ISA of the camera, which means that you can change the brightness of the footage depending on what you want.
- By using websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, we were able to broadcast our final products to an enormous audience as these websites span across the entirety of the internet and are commonly known around the world for watching music videos. It stops us just being able to reach a local audience as immediately becomes viewable worldwide. If these websites didn’t exist then we would have to show the video to a media producer/advertiser to get it public in any way which may cost us money or we would have to agree to their advertisements in our music video, such as product placement; as well as leaflets, posters etc. Feedback can also be given in the form of YouTube comments and Facebook feedback, rather than us having to show it to an audience and them to log their feedback which is a easy and quick way to get feedback. However this an be negative because if someone posts a negative criticism about the music video we wouldn’t be able to remove it, and everyone else is also able to read it as well as us.
amya2media 