Giorgio Carta

Friday 28 February 2014

Task 4 - How Did You Use Media Technologies in the Construction and Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?

Pre-Production:

In the preproduction I used a few different media technologies that allowed me to prepare for the music video.

I used the internet as a research tool during the preparation of the music video. I used search engines such as Google to research our target audince and other bands/artists in the same genre, essentially C2C themselves and what their star image is although that wasn't what we were going for, but still it would have helped my understanding of this genre and this song better as well as what i can do with our own made up star. I also used sites such as soundcloud to listen to similar kind of songs and soundcloud is considered as the youtube(a site where you can upload video clips and watch freely) for audio clips.

I also use mobile phone technology to upload pictures of the studio on to our blog so i can plan the set design and work with the space given. This also enabled us to record our progess and planning. I used my Samsung Galaxy S4 to digitally record, this technogly allowed me to personally upload my thoughts and views, posting this Blogger and enabling me to have a visual digital record of my planning progess. Using my phone I was also able to take pictures of group work that we were doing on paper and post a digital copy eg set designs and mind maps.

Additionally in the pre-production process I created an animatic storyboard where I used Final Cut Pro(A professional editing software) to piece together my animation and all the shots. I used a wav audio soundtrack of the song that played over the top of the sequence. Additionally this help me structure and prepare the real music video and give me an idea of what order the shots should go in.

Research and planning the animatic:

Post Production:
In the post production I designed the website using a site called WIX. Wix.com is a cloud-based web development platform that allows users to create professional HTML5 websites and mobile sites, through use of their online drag and drop tools. Users can add functionalities such as social plug-ins, eCommerce, contact forms, email marketing, and community forums to their websites using variety of Wix developed and third-party application.

Tutorial on how to build a site with WIX:

Digital technology enables me to think with a wider view and inspires creativity, allows decisions to be make and aids progress. It inpires creatively as the use of photoshop enable us to create a digitpak that won't not be possible without digital technology . It allows decision making as the order of the shots and which shots to use was made when using the final cut pro software. Finally it aids progress as it has allowed us to produce a successful medi acampegin and music production.

Director's Commentary Script

Molly: throughout this music video commentary we are going to be talking about how we used digital technology all the way through the course to create a successful creative product.

Archie: During the pre-production one of our set tasks was to create an animatic for our music video, in order to do this, we had to film each frame of our story board with a Sony NX5 camera. After filming each frame of the story board we uploaded the footage onto final cut pro.

Giorgio: We cut the shots together using final cut pro, this helped us to realise what the finished product would look like.

Shane: After finishing the animatic we posted it onto blogger. Blogger is a site that we used throughout the media course, it is a great piece of online software because it allows you to have an ongoing diary of the progress throughout the course.

Molly: We also considered google as a very important platform because it gave us direct access to online media featuring on sites such as YouTube and twitter, Which allowed us to share and collaborate and take influence from existing videos and artists.

Archie: Another way in which we used google as a tool was for our research and planning stages of our course, it gave us the access to videos, pictures and web information, as a result it helped us on our way to creating a good product because it was less time consuming.

Giorgio: Wesch argues that information is shared throughout the world using different platforms such as google and YouTube, this allowed us to research audiences, artists and locations relevant to our project, doing this all via web 2.0.

Molly: On the shoot day we used a vast amount of digital technologies, however, the most important one would be the camera. We Used a Sony FS100 with various lenses of a fixed focal length for the different shot sizes we wished to create. We also used a digital clapperboard for lip sync purposes.

Archie: Another piece of technology that was extremely useful on the shoot day was a camera placed on the ceiling of the studio what this achieved was a time-lapse of the shoot day.

Shane: The reason why we decided to use this was because we felt that it was important to show the details of the production because our target audience can really capture and understand the atmosphere that we were trying to portray.

Giorgio: This was great because it allowed us to look back and see exactly what happened on the shoot day, another advantage of using this meant that we could see the progress of the shoot day and the creative as well as the decision making aspect.

Shane: for the post production of our video we used various amounts of digital technologies to achieve what we wanted to, we made use mainly of Photoshop for the editing of our CD digipack. We made use of final cut pro for the editing of the footage we had shot on the day. And finally, after effects to change the look of the video once we had edited it.

Molly: We used final cut pro, firstly, to select all the shots we wanted and bin the ones that we were not going to use, then lip sync the video to the audio track, this was all initially done on the timeline by using markets for specific parts of the song, on both the footages audio with the playback and the main audio track to lip sync the footage before editing.

Archie: We also used After FX to put the kaleidoscope effect on the clips because the whole video was shot on a green screen.

Giorgio: Due to the fact that we had constructed an animatic and storyboard beforehand, we had a fairly strong idea of how we wanted the video to run as a whole. This meant that at the point where we started editing the footage on final cut pro, the process ran very smoothly.

Shane: We were using digital technology meaning that we could go back and re edit decisions we had already made, meaning that we could get a stronger flow to the narrative.