How did you use media technologies in the contribution and research, planning and evaluation stages?
The use of
media technology was important throughout my research, planning, construction
and also my evaluation.
When
researching and planning at the beginning of the course, I used sites like
YouTube to find examples of other bands of the 'indie pop' genre, research
target audiences and other bands music videos and album covers for inspiration.
With YouTube it enables a degree of control and choice that was not there
before, MTV was originally the only way to watch music videos – which didn’t
allow you to select particular music videos or from a particular genre where as
YouTube enables you specify what you want and re-watch and pause video.
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I used my own Canon 100D DSLR camera to take the photos for my album cover, both inside and outside. It was easier for me to use my own DSLR camera as i understand fully where all the adjustments are such as, zoom, shutter speed, flash on/off and the portrait setting – this as very important especially when creating a shallow depth of field, the importance of my own camera meant as I took the camera to many different locations, I was able to do this efficiently knowing where everything was and it being of high quality. To edit my album cover and magazine advert I used Adobe Photoshop CS6, although I found this difficult to use at first, I soon got to grips with all the editing tools I needed and continued without any issues.
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The 'Magnetic Lasso Tool' allows you to crop out certain areas or features of an image and then this can enable you to either keep this area in colour or in black and white whilst keeping the rest of th image the opposite.
I also used YouTube a variety of times during the construction along side Photoshop – finding tutorials to do specific things with images on Photoshop, for example:
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When creating the main music video production piece, the editing software used was Adobe Premiere Pro, specific tools that were used here were -
We also used speed duration to speed up and reverse the speed on certain clips such as the scrabble board scene, this was due to fast nature and pace of our song and so faster clips worked better.
Colour correction - for example, we changed the brightness and contrast of some of the clips such as the beginning clips where the lighting was still too dark. We used several transitions to move the clips smoothly from one another, the main transition we used being the cross dissolve as show above in the example.
We also used speed duration to speed up and reverse the speed on certain clips such as the scrabble board scene, this was due to fast nature and pace of our song and so faster clips worked better.
Colour correction - for example, we changed the brightness and contrast of some of the clips such as the beginning clips where the lighting was still too dark. We used several transitions to move the clips smoothly from one another, the main transition we used being the cross dissolve as show above in the example.
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Although
these Media 2.0 websites are useful in receiving feedback from a range of
different people from around the world, the comments received are not always
useful. So talking face to face is the best option when trying to find out what
your target audience really thinks, I asked a couple of members of my target
audience more specific questions about my work and received much more useful
feedback.
In
Conclusion, the effects of new technologies did allow me to exceed my creativity.
Although I was able to control the technology skillfully and enable to get it
to do exactly what I wanted, without it being there in the first place, I
wouldn’t have been as creative. The big change in computer-based systems
–enabled me to experiment a lot more whereas, before you couldn’t (Three
Machine Linear Editing).