James - Evaluation Question 4

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

Cameras

We shot all of our footage on the Sanyo Xacti High Definition Dual Camera. These cameras had just been purchased by the schools Media Studies department and therefore we were not familiar with them at the start of shooting. However we soon learnt how to make best use of them and the quality of picture that they filmed was incredible. When we created our AS coursework we were using older cameras that weren’t HD and recorded onto tape, therefore these cameras were a great and welcome improvement.

We did however have some problems with the new camera. Firstly it was recording 60fps in HD, which proved too much information for Premiere (our editing software) to handle. This caused Premeier to crash constantly throughout our editing process; this problem became so bad that our group had to have the final deadline extended because we didn’t have enough time to complete our edit. 

Another problem was had was shooting in slow motion. When a camera films something in slow motion it has to take in much more information then when it is shooting in normal time. To compensate for all of this extra data that it is taking in it reduces the frame size and to use the slow motion footage we then have to resize the frame. This causes its quality to greatly decrease and the image becomes very grainy so we tried to overlay other footage on top so that this was not as noticeable. An example of this can be seen below:

We overlaid Jamie singing to the slow motion shot of us walking. This made the loss of quality less noticeable.

I think that the best thing about the new cameras was then when we put them on manual focus we were able to show depth of field. This effect where the foreground is in focus and the background is out of focus looks very professional and is extremely common in music videos. We would not have been able to create this effect if we had still been using the old cameras. Below is an example of when we used this effect in our music video and also an example of one of JLS’s videos where they use the same effect.

This is one of the shots in which we used 'depth of field'.

This is an example of 'depth of field' used in JLS - Love You More

Pages ‘08

“Pages ’08” is the software I used to create my digipak and advertisement. The reason I used this software rather than Photoshop is because I have an Apple iMac at home at Pages ’08 comes with it. I am very familiar with this software and so found it very easy to use. 

To create my digipak I opened a blank A3 document and within it I made 4 squares that measured 12.7cm in width and height. These were the basic 4 panels of the digipak. I knew that I wanted to have quite a ‘dirty’ and ‘urban’ background to my digipak and so I found a close up image of a hessian bag on the Internet and decided it would be suitable. Below is step by step instructions of how i created the two key images for my digipak. 

Click to enlarge

After I had created the background and made the alien image ready to use all I had to do was select a font and choose a layout. The font I used was called ‘Fenwick’ and I downloaded it off of ‘dafont.com’. This is another example of how Web 2.0 greatly increases the possibilities of what I could achieve. I think this font really suits the bands image, as it is strong and bold. I think there was a danger of the font looking too masculine but I managed to overcome this problem by using a neutral white color. Putting the font in white also helped it stand out from the dark background more, this heavily influenced the adverts leading line in particular.

Blogger

We used a blog to document our research, planning, development, and evaluation stages of our coursework. Using a blog is fantastic because it allows all members of our group to be able to post work at any time and from anywhere that has computer access. It also allows other people to comment on our posts such as the teachers and other members of the class. This collaborative function was very useful during all stages of our coursework, an example of such collaboration can be seen below.

Jamie has commented on some of my work documenting his thoughts and opinions. 

The teachers are also able to mark and comment on our work in the same way. This means that we can very easily submit work and gain feedback even if we are not in school for some reason. An example of this is below:

Ms Johnson is my Media Studies teacher

The blog is a website that allows the user to post images and embed video clips. This is very useful when you need to illustrate one of your points or show people the things that are inspiring you. Here is an example of some ideas that Jamie was interested in and decided to put on the blog to see what me and George though of them.

Jamie included the hyperlink to the different video's YouTube pages. 

Survey Monkey

To gain audience feedback we used a website called surveymonkey.com which provides the software to create a questionnaire. There are several different question types you can choose from such as ‘tick-box’ and ones where the audience has a text field in which to write their own feedback. SurveyMonkey also allows the user to link or email the survey to the target audience. Our group circulated our survey by posting in on the social networking site ‘Facebook’. We thought that this would be the best place to access our target audience because our friends are in the correct age range and also like this genre of music. Here is a screen shot of one of our questionnaires:

Adobe Premier Elements

We used this software to edit our footage because it is more that capable for our needs. The package allowed us to put various effects onto our work as well as doing the basic things like filling a timeline and having different layers of video.

We wanted to distinguish the performance and narrative parts of out video and did this by using the effects that ‘Premiere’ has. We decided that the performance shots looked best in black and white and so simply dragged this effect from the effects menu and dropped it on each performance clip. The narrative shots needed something more unusual however and we tried many different effects before finally settling on one. We used the 'colorize' and removed all blue from the image, whilst also increasing the red content to its maximum. The result of this is shown below:

I think that this makes the narrative shots very striking and the red also connotes that the relationship doesn’t end well.

Premiere also allowed us to speed up footage using the time stretch tool. We used this feature on the traffic shots (see below) as they help to enforce the point that the relationship broke down over a long period of time.

Premiere also allowed us to create a very complex special effect where a photograph, which is thrown to the floor by one of the characters, then starts to become animated and then fades out. To do this we had to get a screen grab of the footage that we wanted to the photograph to be of. Then we had to film the photo falling to the floor, making sure that all if it was in the frame and that it fell perfectly flat. Next we imported the footage onto the computer and overlaid the footage that we wanted the photo merge into and dragged it to the right place and into the right shape.