question 4
- 1. 4. How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Georgina Campbell, Hennie Clough, Kelsey James and Rakhee Patel. Evaluation
- 2. RESEARCH With the research stage of the project we used a variety of different websites to help us find relevant information, videos and pictures to help us to create our video, digi pak and website. If we did not have the internet would could have easily researched using books and we could have watched music videos on the music channel on the television. We used Youtube to help us understand the conventions of different genres of music videos and to sample music which could be suitable for our storyline. Wikipedia was our main source which we used for research as it has a lot of information on different subjects and we knew that it would have information which would be relevant to us. We used it to find information on music videos, digi paks, websites, MTV and more. We wanted to gain a greater understanding of modern music videos so we used Google News to help us find up to date news articles about music videos.
- 3. Band Website We Used We used the bands own websites to give us ideas and help us decide which features to use on our website. We decided to analyse the websites for the same artists as we did for the video analyses so that we could see the links used between the video and the website.
- 4. Planning In the planning stage of the project we used a variety of different websites and physical digi paks to help us find relevant information which would help us develop our ideas further. If we did not have the internet would could have easily researched using books and we could have watched music videos on the music channel on the television. The hard thing would be finding a font for our website and digi pak we would of had to use the default fonts already set on the computer. We also used Youtube to get inspiration on scenes we could include in the video as well as shots we could use. We used dafont.com to help us find fonts which would be suitable to include on our website and digi pak. We used Flickr as a platform to save all of the pictures we wanted to use on our blogs. We did this so that they could all be found and uploaded easily to Blogger.
- 5. Animatic We decided to create an animatic using Finalcut to make our storyboard animated and show what we want our storyline to look like. If we did not have Finalcut or a computer we could have easily shown people what we envisioned our video to look like by showing them the storyboard and explaining what was happening in each scene.
- 6. Construction of the DigiPak I added the flower from the front cover to the CD as the background of the CD by copying a circular section from the flower picture and pasting it as the CD. I changed the opacity of the CD tray so that the background could still slightly be seen. I changed the opacity by using the opacity scale at the side of the screen and changing it to 75% so that it still looked like solid plastic and not completely see through. I used the Text tool to create the text for the name of the album.
- 7. I used the Inner Shadow tool to create the illusion of the CD actually being in the tray. Before Inner Shadow After Inner Shadow If we did not have a computer or Photoshop we would of had to make the digi pack by hand by drawing out what we wanted the product to look like.
- 8. Front Cover Georgina created a mock up of both the front and back covers and I chose which ones I liked the best for the digi pak and developed them further. I resized the pictures so that they would fit the digi pak and I changed the font used for the bands name and I added the name of the bands album to the front cover. I used the same 2 fonts that we have used for the website and the same actress from the video so that there were clear links between the 3 products.
- 9. Making the Digi Pak 3D I used the Free Transform and Transform to mould the our digi pack on to the 3D digi pak template. The 3 main tools I used were: Free Transform Skew Distort If we did not have a computer or Photoshop we would of had to make the digi pak by hand by drawing out what we wanted the product to look like and to make it 3D we would have to stick our images on a piece of folded card so that it stood up straight.
- 10. List of Hardware and Software we used to construct each task. Hardware For filming we used: A tripod A Sony HD camera For the creation of the video, website and digi pack we used: A Mac computer A mouse A keyboard A Philips camera to take picture for the website and digi pack Software For editing we used: Final Cut Express For the creation of the Digi Pack: Photoshop For the creation of the website: Adobe Dreamweaver We used Blogger to document the whole project, Flickr as a platform to show all of the pictures and Vimeo to hold the videos. If we did not have all of this technology it would have been really hard for us to create all 3 products. To create the actual video we could have used a film camera and then edit it in a cutting room by physically cutting the film and sticking it back together in the correct place. To create the digi pack we could have drawn it out by hand but with out the internet or a computer we would never have been able to create a website and so would of had to choose the poster as our second ancillary task.
- 11. Editing and the Website Georgina has written about the editing and the magazine advert and Kelsey has written about the website the links are below. Georgina’s question 4
- 12. Evaluation For question 3 of the evaluation about audience feedback we used Facebook. We added our video to Facebook and asked our friends and family to comment on it. We chose to use this platform as we could reach a wide audience and therefore get a wide range of feedback. To gain feedback on the digi pak i printed out copies of the digi pak finished template and the 3D version and asked 5 people to write comments next to the pictures. To gain feedback about the website I asked people to view the website and then write their comments on a piece of paper. I then added this feed back to my blog by scanning in the copies of the digi pak and inserting them on my blog through a Flickr slide show and I typed out the comments the users left about the website as the user used pencil to write their comments and this was hard to see on screen. To add this slide show to my blog I will use Slideshare.net a free website which allows presentations to be saved and embedded on to websites and blogs. I have also decided that I am gong to use Scribd.com to host my answer for question 1 and 2. Scribd is a document hosting website which will allow me to save my document in a different more interesting format and then add it to my blog. If we did not have these different platforms to help us with our evaluation we could have easily made a folder which included all of our research, planning, construction and evaluation just like we did last year and we could have easily asked people for feedback verbally rather than asking them to leave comments on Facebook.