Evaluation - Question 4 (James Presland)

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

Construction 

In terms of the production process, My group and I used the Canon DSLR E05 650D camera and the Nikon D7000 DSLR to film footage for the music video and to also take stills for the Digipak.

Using these two cameras allowed me to immerse in the role as a director and cinematographer. The 4k capability of the Nikon D7000 allowed me to capture high-resolution stills and film, however, unfortunately, we could not upload any video to youtube in 4k quality. I explored the construction of each frame while filming. I experimented with the use of positioning of different shots.

While we were filming and creating this camera my group and I made sure to keep in mind what our aim and intention for this project was to create a convincing and realistic media text. By experimenting and exploring different filming and editing techniques, I strengthened the cinematography and overall look of my media text by transforming my scenes into more stylish and professional scenes.

We were already fairly familiar with the Canon DSLR EOS 650D as we used this for our preliminary tasks in both year 13 and 12 and also my group's thriller trailer in year 12. We could also use this camera to gain a second angle shot along with the Nikon D7000. This also provided us with another SD card which we could use as a backup filming camera.
However, one disadvantage of using the Canon DLSR EOS 650D is that the battery life was fairly weak and needed to have a spare battery carried around with it when we went on filming sessions. This meant that we had to choose when to film specific shots instead filming rough cuts and rehearsal shots.  The other issue with this camera was the fact that the Quality of the picture was not as good as the Nikon D7000.

In terms of pre-production research and post-production editing, My group and I used a wide range of websites and software such as Blogger, Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop, iMac computers, Youtube.

Blogger

Blogger is an online blog website. I used Blogger to document my research and planning of my music video and the filming of the music video. An advantage to Blogger is that we had also used it last year so the group was familiar with the layout of the site and how to tag each other in posts and who to upload posts. In addition, the embedding of videos, gifs and pictures function enables you to assist your text with examples with ease of use. A disadvantage to Blogger is that sometimes the format on the website can glitch and become disjointed, this requires you to edit and fix your post. Moreover, on occasions, Blogger may crash and all of your work may be lost.



Youtube

Youtube is a content sharing website that is free to use. My group and I used Youtube a lot during both our Year 12 Thriller trailer media project and also our Year 13 Music Video media project. An advantage to using Youtube is that we can receive feedback from people that we do not know. We also used Youtube to search for our song that we used in our music video. Youtube's message function and description space for contact information allowed us to contact Cadence Kid the creator of our song and enabled us to request if we could use his song in our project.
However, when uploading content to Youtube and viewing large content files the website can temporarily crash and take an extended period of time to load the video and buffer.




Prezi

Prezi is an internet based program that is similar to Microsoft Powerpoint. Prezi enables you to present your production blog information in a unique and interesting fashion. An advantage to Prezi is that the website based program updates and saves your work every few seconds, so unlike Blogger your work is safe even if your internet crashes or computer crashes. In addition, when the Prezi presentation is complete, the embedding function on Blogger is extremely compatible with Prezi allowing you to enter the Prezi URL and for the presentation to display itself in a user-friendly way. However, the navigation for the user while viewing the information on the slides may be unpleasant and confusing as Prezi works by zooming in and out from larger bubbles to smaller bubbles representing topics and sub-topics.




iMac Computers

The iMac computer was the computer that we used to edit and process all our footage and stills for our Digipak. One advantage of the iMacs was they were located inside the Media rooms this meant that my group and I could access. The iMac computers are very easy to use and most of our group was familiar with them already. The iMacs also have a very highly powered processing unit which came into good use when editing as the Final Cut Pro editing software was already on the iMacs. However, On rare occasions, the power could cut out causing us to lose unsaved work.



Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is a photo editing software that we used in year 12 to create icons for production logos and in Year 13 to create stills for our Digipak. The software was surprisingly easy to use and created professional results. We edited the images for our magazine advert and Digipak on photoshop as it kept the 4K quality from the Nikon D7000.

Photoshop also enabled us to position and crop our still images in order to form our Digipak.







Final Cut Pro 

Final Cut Pro is the main editing software that we used to edit our music video with. Final Cut Pro was easy to use and our group was already familiar with many functions such as stabilisation, composition and cropping clips because of our experience with editing last year's Thriller trailer.

During the Preliminary 'Budget Britney' task we learnt how to silence and remove the audio from the footage used and replace and synchronise it with the audio from the actual song that we were creating a music video for, we did this in order to create synergy within the video and also because most Pop song videos have the artist lip singing. However, due to poor lip singing, we were unable to exactly synchronise both the audio and visuals, this was also heard in feedback.

While experimenting with music video conventions during our preliminary task we used a green screen and edited the footage using chroma key on Final Cut Pro. However, we found that during the storyboarding of the music video we did not need to use a green screen as it would not fit the style of music and our location for filming was accessible for us. However, we did add effects such as birds singing and the rustling of leaves as it offered a feeling of verisimilitude near to the end. We also learnt how to edit the visual to the music, this involves making jump cuts during climaxes in the music and matching the mellow and sombre mood of the music with the calm visuals.



Problems we encountered 

Problem 1: The lights we were using to shoot the actor by the river were too bright and could be seen on the actor's clothes. We found a solution to this by adding a light filter to make the light less powerful and bright. This light then acted as a backlight in our three key lighting.

Problem 2: A large part of our footage of the protagonist walking through central London was not filmed on a camera dolly so it made the footage shaky and unpleasant to view. In order to solve this we used the stabilisation tool on Final Cut Pro, this tool goes frame by frame through a selected clip of video and realigns the image to make the visuals easier to view.

Problem 3: Some of the clips placed at the start of the music video were not aligning with the music in time and this meant the whole music video and lip singing was out of time. We solved this by cropping clips into smaller sections, this lead to more flexibility in where I could place the clips and changed the flow of the video.