During the course of the last few months i have used a large variety of different technologies to aid me in the making of my music video, technologies that were really helpful are Final Cut pro, YouTube, Google, Mobile phones, Photoshop and Sony NXF cameras. The digital technologies have helped me hugely in my research to look into existing products and similar artists, in my planning for sourcing props and looking for inspiration, and in the evaluation stage to edit the work we have done to make them fit together.
Research:
We split up into our groups and began thinking up ideas for our music videos, for this we did use Google a bit to get some inspiration, it's something i've grown up using so find it very easy to get my way around it and with the almost unlimited source of information it's been a very useful way to help research and develop our ideas. But to start off the ideas development process using technologies we used Power point presentations to pitch our ideas to the media department and rest of the class.
The Internet was a huge part of our planning process. We easily chose which idea to do, but we hadn't decided on a song yet so we went to Google to look up a certain style of song. Typing in '60s french pop song' straight away linked us to lots of different websites with actual old French songs, but we knew doing a song with french lyrics would be too hard but would have been great. The main site it took us to too was YouTube where we were able to search for more songs and then while watching a video it comes up with similar songs, so we weren't just stuck to one artist, this is an incredible too to use. It allowed us to search through as many songs as we needed to, while being able to refer back to the Advert that we had seen on TV. This meant we could watch the advert and listen to another song to see weather the tone and rhythm of the other songs worked or not.We did this until we found the one we all thought sounded he best and went with the image we wanted for our girl.
We also used this later on once we had chosen our girl (Emma) and some boy characters to be in the photo shoot room and cafe/bar area. this allowed us to see how she looked with them and weather they were confident enough for it to work and look good with what we had planned for them. It worked really well because we were able to go back over our footage to concentrate individually on which guys looked the best, and we were now beginning to put together an image of what it could actually look like as the final product.
Again we used the internet a lot to look up styles for our different set rooms, but i also used the camera on my phone to take a picture of my mum's dressing room and show the group. I did this because I thought it had the style that we were trying to find (very pure white/creams with a girly/pretty table and mirror decorated with jewellery, make up and perfume) and everyone else agreed so this was very helpful. It's so instant taking a photo on your phone, and then you have it for as long as you want and can share it with who ever you want.
Although we used a lot of technologies to help us on the way to our product, we did do a lot as a group on physical copies, like the timeline we made using post it notes so we could shuffle them around while we were working out our layout and timings, but to make sure this was involved in my blog i used my camera on my phone again. Because people use their smart phones on the go so much, so many applications have created ones for phones, and Blogger has, so I downloaded it and used it to do some quick posts if i had a photo on my phone to upload i could do it via that which made it very quick and easy.
Using our storyboard we created an annimatic by filming the individual pictures for about 10 seconds and then cutting it together on iMovie Maker on a Mac computer. This gave us more physical proof of what it would actually look like, so we could see which parts we wanted longer and which areas needed more going on. This defiantly aided the development of our video as is moved on a lot more after doing this.
Another technology we used a lot on the computer was emails. It was a very helpful way to contact all of our actors and anyone involved in getting or making our props instead of having to rush around waisting time trying to find them, we could just simply send and email and then get on with other important things until they emailed back. We used it first to email our girls to meet us in the studio at separate times because we didn't want any of them to be watching each other and interfering, this worked well and they all did as we asked. With the boys we were able to do group emails which made things quicker. So we used it for a range of different tasks : finding out when our cast could do rehearsals, telling them when and where they were, thanking them after rehearsals, giving them the song or lyrics, asking drama and music departments for specific props, and then all the information for the actual shoot day.
Once we had done our filming day the four main technologies we used were Blogger, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and Wix.com
Photoshop was used to create our Digipak, as it was the easiest way to play around with and edit different photos together. We knew we wanted to have a big close up of Emma’s face as the front because she is the star and because she is so beautiful she would stand out on a shelf. We also wanted to have a bit of sex appeal in the photos to attract her male fans and inspire her females. A number of photos had been taken on the day so we went through and chose a few of the best ones to use, but we didn’t use the whole of any, the photos were cut on the area we wanted and too fit the template for a digipak that I found on the internet. Because all the photos were from the same set, we thought it looked a bit strange as we had so many different sets it could get a bit messy and confusing if we used different ones. Taking a look at the digipak all together it gave a really nice affect with the breaking down of her body parts, along with being flirtatious, it fit our target audience aims of being all about her fashion and beauty.
We hadn’t planned taking these
photos well enough so that when we managed to put the chosen four edited photos
together on the digipak template, although they had been taken with the same
back round, the photo with Emma’s face had a darker shade of blue in the back
round because we obviously hadn’t concentrated enough on the rest of the photo.
So to fix this there is a tool called ‘Magnetic Lasso’ which allows you to cut
round any object (we cut round her face) and then we layered it ontop of a
section of back round from one of the other photos, so that all the colours
matched up, which helped complete the product as that had been standing out to
all of us as something that didn’t look professional enough.
