EVALUATION QUESTION 4

EMILY GAHAME

TECHNOLOGY

Media technology is constantly developing and helped me and awful lot during construction, research, planning and evaluation stages of my music video promo package. I personally feel that the use of technology allowed me to move away from the simple and traditional style of text and image. The use of technology can help in creating and contributing to the work, but also can be used in different forms or work presentation.

The use of new media such as Final cut Pro and Magic Bullet helped during the construction section of the task. Final Cut Pro was the main catalyst that helped our music video progress and develop throughout each stage. Having access to effects, blade, cropping and distorters was useful because we had a lot of footage that needs cutting and modifying to fit in with our lip-syncing. In Final Cut we wanted to create an effect that produced a signature visualisation for the audience to remember and relate specifically to our music video. The kaleidoscope effect made this possible; we only used 2 effects and this was one of them we used repeatedly.

Relating back to audience feedback, they liked this very much because they thought it fitted in well with our theme. Magic Bullet is another piece of technology that we used to colour correct our music video. The use of colour is a major aspect because if the colour is corrected it will give a professional overall look. When filming in the studios the lights tend to create a colour corrected look because the intense lighting produces an artificial feel, which seems to look professional.

Final Cut Pro is a very good source in terms of editing, however it does have its disadvantages. I personally thought the rendering time was very slow. When loading content it usually takes quite a long time. This is also present when making a significant change, such as cropping and inserting music. This is expected due to the amount of work that is saved onto the software, however everything took longer.

When we filmed without the use of major lighting we had to colour correct our footage with the help of the programme Magic Bullet. A specific example of this would be when shooting the end of the music video, we decided it was lacking something and through feedback someone suggested the colours needed to be enhanced and therefore we used Magic Bullet to do so and it definitely looked better.

As you can see here, the contrast in the pictures in huge due to the colour correction.

Magic Bullet is a very professional product which is used in many films and music videos. However the only downside that effected me was the little knowledge I had of it. I was not confident with navigating the system and what each button did, therefore I was limited to what I could do with it. Myself and Jess understood the basics, but we wanted to see if Magic Bullet could do more for us than Final Cut in that particular area. It did, however I'm sure it could do a lot more.

Also throughout the construction stage and planning we used technologies such as Dafont and YouTube. Dafont was the website that we used for our fonts on the ancillary tasks- digipak and magazine advert. We did not want to use standard fonts because that does not show much individually to our work and we also wanted a specific font that would match our 17th century theme.

After searching through Dafonts fonts we found one that Jess and myself both liked. It was called ‘ruffled feathers’ and portrayed a sophisticated and girly feel. YouTube was a huge influence on a lot of the work myself and Jess created. We noticed that once uploaded a video, there are a range of effects that can be applied before it gets posted on the web. We thought these were very useful because these effects were no available for us on Final Cut Pro. Therefore we used an effect named ‘light’, this made the video seem as if the brightens had been amplified and therefore gave more of a professional look.

Dafont has a huge scope for fonts and definitely has a wide range and variety. However the only problem with it was having to download the particular font that we wanted. That resulted in us having to download the font to 3 of 4 different programmes in order to us to use on our ancillary tasks.

The internet is probably the most common and helpful type of technology that we used. Due to it being so global and having many sources of information it sped up some of the stages throughout the tasks. Social networking sites were a main feature that we used throughout the whole of the tasks, however mostly used in the research and evaluation stages. Throughout the planning stages we decided to upload our work to our individual profiles on Facebook and Twitter.

Due to most of our ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ being around our age group and therefore our music video target audience we thought it would be a good idea to get some feedback from outside the media world. We uploaded our treatment onto our accounts to see if the public agreed with the feedback we received from our media peer group.

We also used YouTube to gain feedback, YouTube is a huge website where the users are the producers, or as Henry Jenkins stated, the ‘prosumer’. We received a lot of positive and also negative feedback from this, which helped is dramatically. Many people like to state there own opinions on other peoples work on the internet and this is constantly increasing.

The use of technology when It came to the presentation of our work was imperative. We needed to present our ideas in a creative way and move away from the traditional style of text and image. With the help of Wix, Slide share, bubble.us and Prezi.

All of these websites enabled myself to construct my work into a better format which looked good visually and also easy to read. Another form of presentation was by using a camera and recording myself. I generally used this type of technique when publishing diary entries because they are quick short videos, therefore not many minutes of myself talking into a camera. I found all of these ways of presenting my work very easy to navigate round and also found it very clear with what I could and could not do.

The blog that we were publishing our work on definitely had a limit of what I could do. I found it very awkward when trying to manoeuvre images surrounding text. They constantly would not go in the place that I wanted and therefore ended up making up some of the presentations messy. As you can see from the picture above there is also a limited amount of tools to use.

The pictures to the left I originally wanted the same size and in a different order, however blogger did not allow me to do this.

However the blog does have some advantages such as being able to pick what type of style screen such as, snapshot and timeline views. Changing the colours of backgrounds and text was also available but was quite standard. I think blogger is still a much better way of presenting the work instead of using a programme such as Word. Work is quite dated because of the rise in what is available on he internet, therefore I think using a website such as Blogger is a creative way to present work and keep up with the rise in technology.

When creating the print based ancillary tasks, technology was a huge impact on that. Photoshop was one of the major influences when producing my magazine avert in particular. With the help of Photoshop we were able to use a picture that was of the best quality we could get. If we hadn’t used this then we would have had to create our magazine advert on the basis of a screenshot.

Photoshop enabled to change my orientation of my picture; Jess and myself thought the picture we were going to originally use would look better for a magazine advert if we made the photograph landscape instead of portrait.

We were able to do this because we were using the Photoshop programme, if we were using something like PowerPoint or Word this would be a lot harder to do and would not come out to be the best quality. Dafont was also used in the process because we used the font that was on the digipak and incorporated that in the magazine advert to keep consistency.

I found Photoshop quite challenging to use and first because I have never attempted to use if before. However after a few days of getting used to it and using YouTube tutorials to help Jess and Myself understand what some individual tools did and how to use them, it got a lot easier.