OH-Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation

For the research part of our project, I used mainly YouTube, so that I could find videos by artists from the same genre as our chosen song, and deconstruct them in a way which would be advantageous in finding out how these videos have constructed meaning and how they allow the viewer to relate to the track threw more than the lyrics.

I found a very useful video to be “Many of Horror- Biffy Clyro” which became very useful in the performance part of our video, it showed us some good conventions and shots that can be applied into our performance.

This inspired me to put a show similar to one that they had in their video because I believed that it would be very effective in our video. It’s a MCU with a light in the background, to some extent silhouetting me as the artist, which has been very effective.

After I had found out about the tracks though and had posted a entrance on the blog using blogger, I was also able to get a bit of feed back from the other members of the group to see if they agreed with the information I had found out and to see whether they thought we could implement my research into our video.

During the planning stage of the project, a fair few more media technologies were used, due to the fact that this was more about presenting our work, for example the pitch and audience research.

To gather information for audience research the tool we used was survey monkey, this allowed us to create a questionnaire that would be appropriate for the questions that we wanted to ask, such as “would you watch the video again” to see if it would stand up to repeatability for example, and it was also easy way to view the results on a chart.

We then posted the survey on Facebook which allowed us to get feedback from people of our own age, a key demographic in the market that we would have been aiming our product for.

Once we had this information we constructed our pitch, we did this using Power Point, in this we listed the usual things that were needed to be seen for our video to be allowed to be signed off, such as locations, meis-en-scene and appropriate presentation of our audience research.

We then uploaded this to slideboom which allowed us to make a link of our pitch slides into a page by page “document” which allowed people to view our slides easily, so it looked far more presentable.

Pitch For Drops of Jupiter by Boyce Avenue 3

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For the construction of our video we used windows premier 8.0, this allowed us to use high quality video footage, far better quality than we had last year. It also allowed us to experiment with different depths of field when it came to the focussing of our show, although we didn’t find this very effective for our video.

This program allowed us to add filters and other effects to our finished product which allowed us to make a more professional looking video.

We added a orange filter to the performance to give a more authentic and brighter performance which we thought would add authenticity to the performance. However we used a blue wash on the narrative of our video to further connote sadness and loneliness to the actor’s performance.

We did this by putting all of the narrative on the video one line and all of the performance on the video 2 line, this allowed us to select all the narrative, and all the performance and add the filters we wanted to.

For the Digipack and Adverts we used Photoshop. This allowed us to upload images we had taken and edit them in a way we thought was appropriate to give us the ability to construct the image that we wanted for the artist.

I used many different tools in Photoshop. For my advert I used the blur tool a lot. I used this to blur out the whole of the background to make me as the artist stand out in the advert, which I think draws more attention to the artist.

For the font I used the same font that Jack had used in his advert. However the text didn’t stand out quite as much as I wanted it too, so to correct this I created a replicated layer of the text and made the text grey, I placed that under the original text and moved it three pixels down and to the right, which overcame the problem.

The final tool I used in photo shop was when it came to adding the stars for the five star rating. I did this by finding an image of a star in the images box, copying it four times so I had five of them, aligning them all and making them the same size.

I think all of these techniques were very effective in the making of my advert, and although not too many massive techniques were used in the editing except for slowing and speeding up time and also the filters we added, I think that the video and the ancillary texts have become very effective in the construction of the artists image.

During the evaluation, the tools I used were blogger, putting up posts with images to make the blog more astetically pleasing and to help understand the text more.