Saturday, April 20, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Evaluation 4
How did you use new media technologies in the
construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
This was definitely the hardest but most
enjoyable educational experience I’ve ever had without a doubt. I challenged my
own flaws of time keeping and laziness which was extremely difficult,
especially completing work on weekends.
I had to get to know how to use programs I’ve
never had knowledge of using before and tried to utilize a variety of new media
technologies during this process as well.
Recording was challenging because I’ve never
had any filming experience. We had to think carefully about the camera angles
we chose. The camera angle we consistently used simply because we believed it
would sit well with our video and genre was the close up shot. We wanted to use
loads of these shots to add variety when it came to actually editing the music video.
This definitely had a huge effect overall on the work as we found some shots we
didn’t really want to use but really came along well once editing it.
This was difficult as some of the close up
shots we took were in the London Underground where it is extremely busy and
people would be walking past you back and forth. A close up of the Female 1’s
high heels in the underground was difficult to record as we had to get down to
the floor in such a busy environment. During most scenes we used the Camera
Tripod as this would help us get a still shot, clear shot.
Whilst
creating the Digipak, we used Photoshop which gave us the result we had wanted
from the beginning. Using techniques such as Duo Tone, this allowed us to make
the colour on the Digipak red and kept the fine detail of the pictures we
originally had inserted.
Whilst creating the Magazine advert we used
both Photoshop and Illustrator, this worked to our advantage as we would edit
the pixilated image on Illustrator and then again edit it with a vast range of
different techniques such as Duo Tone to add colour and variety to the image.
Adobe Illustrator was helpful in the making of
the Record Label as it allowed us to use ‘Live Trace’, a technique that
sharpens the text and gets rid of any pixilated images.
Making of the music video
We had to use Final Cut Pro X as our editing
program. This program was extremely effective as it had keyer’s which would
eventually work perfectly for our music video. I used this program to cut and
edit the music video as well as add special effects to the scenes such as Cold
Steel and Flash intro which added a to the music video. It gave huge impact it
made on our editing was immense. We had to cut a lot of our long scenes down
into small portions using the Blade Tool which enabled us to do so. Some scenes
done in slow-motion were done using the Slow-Mo tool where we can control the
speed of the shot (x10,x25,x100 for example).
The on beat cuts we used were very similar to
those cuts we were looking at whilst researching other R&B music videos. It
suited our song very well too as the beat was effective.
After Effects permitted us to be imaginative,
letting us add effects to the text, so we added glows and shadows on the texts
which would appear in our music video. It also helped us choose a nice shade of
colours, mainly red as this colour was to connote the symbol of love in our
music video which would relate to the R&B genre; for our background which
was originally a green screen we had been using during recording.
Looking at our Facebook feedback, the main
problem we came across was the background , it looked too unprofessional and
didn’t look like it fitted our music video at all, so I believed it was vital
that we really worked on improving the background and making it match the
quality of the song. We had looked at many different backgrounds; pictures and
textures for example, but we came to the conclusion that a White fading away
with Black background texture would work really well as it suited the artist
and the genre. The effects were tremendous as it really did bring the artists
face out as well as the jewellery he was wearing.
Research for music videos
In the beginning we used YouTube as a research
tool to look at and analyse different music videos for our music genre. We then
had a deeper understanding as to what this project demanded and understood it
would be no easy task to complete.
As a group of three, we were all into hip hop
and R&B so we knew what kind of songs to look for and analyse. We looked on
youtube and sites such as Datpiff.com to see exactly what we were looking for. Datpiff.com
was better than YouTube because it specifically looked and specialized on our
Hip Hop and R&B genre and this definitely came to our advantage. On Youtube
we found that we had to look deeper into the music videos we were researching
and we actually found that they tend to use the close up camera angle a lot
more than any other camera angle. They usually do close ups on the shoes and
jewellery to highlight the wealth. Once I had told the group and decided on
what song we was going to choose, we began choosing actors and began recording
test footage on our cameras. We did the test footage to get a variety of
different angles and different scenes we could use in the actual music video.
Research Magazine and Digipak
Researching digipaks was not really hard for
me since I was a consistent buyer of albums from HMV, especially those of the
Hip Hop and R&B genre. I knew exactly what our digipak should look like and
exactly what goes well on digipaks.
Researching magazines wasn’t so easy as I
didn’t really know where to look for good example. Instead I used the internet and
looked at websites such as XXL.com to look for great hip hop magazine adverts
examples, also looking at Vibe Magazine who has great magazine adverts too. I
downloaded the Google Play Magazines App to look through many different music
magazines to get different ideas of what to add to this advert, this
essentially was the most helpful source as it really did broaden my ideas and
make me look at different things to add to the magazine advert.
Planning
We used BlogSpot and this allowed us to create
posts and videos and this was very helpful as it kept all my work organized and
well structured, but keeping up to date wasn’t so I personally had a timetable
on my phone to remind myself of recording days, blogging days and informing the
group on recent progress.
We could constantly text each other to plan
when to shoot and sometimes it would be mornings so we’d have to call each
other to meet up somewhere on the weekend for example, this kept everything up
to date.
Evaluation
The evaluation stage was extremely stressful
as the question we were asked required us to go into extreme depth about why we
chose to do the most minor of things in the research, production and planning stages
of our music video, magazine advert and DigiPak and how they related to our demographic
through denotations and subliminal connotations be it colour scheme, design
style or typographic style.
This was definitely an enjoyable experience. As
a group I believe all of our strengths came together to create such an amazing
project and I believe we worked well together. All in all, it was very
demanding but it all paid off, I hope.
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