Evaluation: Question 4

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

In the beginning of my project, I had used the internet for many things. First of all I created a blog on the website, Blogger. This was to track all my progress and post all my work onto as I went along (see image below). This allowed my teacher to comment on my posts and tell me what needed editing and how I was doing overall. Also it allowed me to sort all my posts into different labels. These labels would appear on the side of my blog and when clicked, it would show all posts with that label on. This ensured ease of use for me, my teacher and moderator when looking at my blog.
 

Other things I had used on the internet, was the search engine, Google, and YouTube, I had used these throughout my project. For research I did it to search for theories (such as Andrew Goodwin’s) and YouTube music videos (for my textual analyses). Also during construction of my tasks I used these sites to find out how to do things, such as watching video tutorials on colour correction on Youtube, for example.

Also, during the evaluation stage of my project I had used YouTube to upload my video, I also posted the link to my video on the social network site, Twitter. This helped me to get audience feedback for my video.

For my music video, I had used my Canon 550D, a DSLR Camera, with a Prime Lens with a focal length of 50mm.  I have been doing photography for a number of years now so I am used to using the camera. What I liked about the camera was that it recorded in full 1080p HD, and the lens allowed me to manually adjust focus, this allowed me to play with depths of focus and change from shallow to deep ranges.

 I also used a tripod when filming which helped me achieve very clean cut looks. However for a part of my video there is a handheld scene shot from my female actor’s point of view, I did this to make it purposefully shaky to portray her intoxication with alcohol. I had a few problems on my first day of filming, my battery died and my full-up memory card stopped me from filming anymore. However I fixed this problem in the rest of my filming shoots by always carrying a fully charged spare battery and removing clutter on the memory card, and deleting shots if they didn’t go right.

For my video editing, I used an industry-standard program called Sony Vegas Pro. At first, I was going to do it on Final Cut Express on the Macs in school, but I felt that because it wasn’t the full version of final cut, I was very limited as to what I could do. Also, I had purchased Sony Vegas earlier in the year so I would be able to edit at home as well, which would free up my lesson time to work on other aspects of my project. I found that Sony Vegas was a godsend.  One of my favorite things about the program was that you didn’t have to render each section as you go before you were able to preview the edit (something you had to do on final cut) instead you just rendered it when you were done. This had a big effect on the speed of my editing, as I had very big files as I was recording 1080p footage at 30fps, so if I did have to render each section as I went, it would take me 5minutes to be able to preview every minute change I had made in the video, which would’ve been a nightmare when perfecting lip sync.

For my ancillary tasks I had to create print work, a digipak and a magazine advert. For this I used Corel Paintshop Pro X4, I chose this over the usual Adobe Photoshop, because I’ve had previous experience using it in photography work in the past, and also because I have purchased it, it allows me to work at home. Using Corel Paintshop allowed me to easily create graphic, texts and add effects to images.