HOW DID YOU USE MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN THE CONSTRUCTION AND RESEARCH, PLANNING AND EVALUATION STAGES?

Planning and Research Stage
In the planning/research stage we used many technologies. These were mainly internet based because we had to look at existing music videos to analyse and get ideas for our product. During our research phase we used youtube quite a lot. You tube is one of the best websites allowing you to access millions of free videos. This allowed us to find any video that we wanted to analyse with ease. We also used google a lot to find images and information. We used google because as a search engine it has the most accurate results to get the information that you wanted, because we wanted to film on a beach we had to look up the tide times and the sunset times which took no time at all thanks to google. These would be fairly standard uses when researching anything because they are so good. They really helped us in finding the indie videos we wanted to analyse. As a free source it is brilliant to use.

 

                                                     

Also in the planning stage we used myspace.com as a way of communicating with our band. Myspace is a social network where people or groups can display videos and chat. Myspace was brilliant as we were able to find out what the band were like listen to their music and speak to them to see it they wanted to have a music video. When we got our band and were more familiar with them we then communicated over the lead singers facebook page. Facebook is another social network site that does similar things to myspace. Using facebook we were able to arrange filming dates and consult the band about different aspects of the video.

We also used blogger in the research and planning stage to write down and view all of our work so far. As we used blogger last year we were very familiar with it. Setting it up was very easy and posting is as simple as can be. The good thing about using it is that because everything is stored online you can go back and edit/change it or add more whenever you want, this makes it so easy to do a little bit at a  time.     

Construction Stage

We used more technologies in the the construction phase than we did any other. As well as using all the previous websites during the construction stage we also used Cameras, tripods and many other things. We used 3 mini-DV cameras when we went on both of our filming days. Taking 3 was good because we were able to get all the angles we needed in a quicker time. Having three cameras was essential due to the battery life of the cameras. On both of our filming days we had one camera that ran out of battery. On the upside the footage we managed to get was a good quality. The quality of the footage is some part was due to the tripods used. Using the tripods allowed us to keep our footage still and because of the extendable and retractrable legs we were able to get our footage at different levels. The only bad points about the tripods were that the cameras didn't always screw on  properly so they could be quite loose. This meant we had to keep the tripods really still on location to get the best quality footage.

We bought our own taped to use in the cameras. These tapes had well enough space on them to do what we needed. The tapes weren't a problem as long as the cameras worked. 

When on location we used a camera and our iphones to take pictures to use for our CD sleeves and posters. Strangely the iphone pictures looked a better quality than the actual cameras so we used them instead.

We used imovie, to put all of our footage together to create our finished music video. Imovie is a small editing software that allows you to create small films and videos. It is a really good software doing what we needed to do. It was really easy to edit all the clips to the exact time scale we needed as it lets you work down to 0.01 seconds. Imovie would struggle to something on a large scale as it isn't a professional editing software.

Evaluation Stage

Through our evaluation stage we used the internet mainly. We used youtube again to upload our finished music video and to upload our band interview. This allowed us to put it on blogger to be able to evaluate it. Blogger was the main use in the evaluation stage as we used this to do every evaluative thing we have done. On our audience research we used Microsoft Excel to create our graphs.