Evaluation Question 4

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

What aspects of new media we used:

• Digipaks
• Viral advertisements
• Magazine advertisements
• Music video competition
• Online Feedback
• Blogs
• Nikon D-300S
• Photoshop Elements
• Final Cut Express
• iMovie

The camera we used, a Nikon D-300S, was particularly useful in the production and construction stages of our product. This is because the camera was of excellent quality, and it added value to our overall product being able to shoot our video with a higher resolution camera. The camera also made it a lot easier for us to film as due to it being George's camera, we could take it out and film when needed, without having to book a camera from the media department.

SCREENSHOT OF CAMERA

Photoshop was also an important technology we used in the construction process of our products, namely in both our ancillary texts. Although my skills on photopshop were fairly limited, it was still a key technology in both drafting and then completeing our final digipak and magine advertisements. The application made the editing of these products a lot easier, and improved the quality also.
In making the digipak and mag ad, tusing the auto correct and auto sharpen tools were how I began the processes, as it immediately rendered the photo into looking completely different and unique, before I converted it into black and white, going with teh newspaper effect for the magazine ad, and the infared effect for the digipak. I then proceeded to crop the phot and then used the magnetic lassoo tool to select key parts of the photo, in order to layer them and give the swing impression that can be seen on both the covers of the digipak.
We differed in style as the layers on the magazine ad had colour on in order to attract the audience's eye, but we kept the product basic, which is an indie convention, and remained in black and white on the digipak.

For the spine of the digipak, I used the clone stamp tool to get some of the indie background seen in the front cover, and then used this as it looked very effective, whilst also being a connecter between the front and back covers, as the background was the same on both sides, albeit on the back cover it being extremely lighter, to contrast the front.
 Finally, the opacity had to be reduced on some layers., and then they had to be both locked and linked together, in order to merge together so the product could be once again cropped before it was finally ready.

iMovie was particularly useful for our rough cuts, as we could draft them out on this application, and prepare the video before the important editing such as cross cutting could be done on Final Cut. Without iMovie we would have gone into the key construction stage of the music video with a vague picture of how we wanted our shots to be organised, so it was key to our planning stages

Our blogs were key to our research and planning stages as it was on here that we could convey our ideas, inspirations and industry convention analysis'. They also helped us integrate facebook, twitter, and youtube into our final product which was a benefit when evidencing.

Final Cut - On final cut we had to order clips, cut them and add layers or transitions to them. George managed to find many key transitions, such as an out of focus shot that would go into the next one, which became key in our music video when we incorporated the idea of using flashbacks. Cross cutting can be seen towards the end of our video and this again was a key part of the editing process. It was also essential to use final cut in order to extract audio from the narrative and performance clips, and layer the music track onto it so that is all that could be heard.

The music video competition George submitted the video to was useful in the research and planning stages as we got genuine feedback from people in the industry and therefore this feedback was taken with extreme consideration as if they enjoyed the product, then we knew we were doing a good job. It also allowed to have added screenings and gave the video more views than it would have done had it not been submitted.