Evaluation - Charlotte Baker

 Q1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


Q2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?




Q3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?



 Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Youtube:
Throughout all stages of our project, we were using Youtube as a guide. When planning our initial research for our music video, we used to it to pick up on typical conventions of our genre by watching different types of music videos. Not only did we use it to watch professional music videos, but previous students had used it to upload their projects which helped us enormously as we were able to watch these and create a list of strengths and weaknesses that we could include and avoid. During our editing stage, I used youtube to find a tutorial on how to cut a picture using Final cut. Without Youtube I would never have been able to do this and our pictures may not have looked so professional. In addition, Youtube enabled us to upload our rough cut and final cut of our music video which meant we could put it onto our blog.

Blogger:
To keep on track of all the preliminary research we did for our research we used Blogger, which is an online blog. We were able to record whatever we had ideas on during the lesson, such as the research on professional or student videos, update it by putting any tutorials we used, put evaluations of mise-en-scene etc. We found it extremely useful as we were able to look back to what we had written in the case of forgetting an idea we had had in one lesson and were able to monitor other ideas from the rest of the group which had not been voiced out loud within the lessons. This helped us to then create our final cut and our ancillary products as we had noted down all of our evaluations and research.

Photoshop:
Using photoshop helped us to edit our photos that we took for our ancillary products to make them look more professional. This was done by changing the colours of the front cover of the digipak so that the picture looked more airbrushed, this then made it fit in with the conventional digipak front cover of R&B genre.

Final Cut:
Final cut played a gigantic part in the making of our music video. We were able to edit all of our clips with this technology and it also enabled us to change the green screen background using colour corrector, cut clips that had not been shot to the standard we'd hoped and were able to edit and filter to different clips together to create abstract backgrounds.

Green Screen and cutting:
By watching a tutorial on youtube I was able to learn how to change the green screen background by changing certain settings such as the chroma key. By doing this it made created great effects within our music video as we used various abstract backgrounds. i also learned by watching a tutorial that I could cut a picture and fit it back within the screen without distorting the picture. I was able to do this through the cut tool on Final Cut.

Camera and tripod:
We were given a video camera to film our shots on for our music video by the college. As i do not own one of these it was a new experience to film with it and I learnt very simple things such as switching it off, starting the recording and watching back the videos we had already filmed. We were also given a tripod which helped me to realise just how important it is to keep your camera steady; if this is not done so the shot looks very unstable and unprofessional! I learnt how to set it up and adjust it to help us film at different angles.