Question 2: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?
Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Throughout the project of creating our music video and 2 products, we have used a variety of different technology. We have used it to research into real products and music genre conventions to understand how and why these products are made in the way they are. We have also used it to plan and produce our music video, digipack and magazine advert, and lastly to show our work to the audience and make an evaluation on all 3 products.
Blogger
During our journey of making our 3 products, we have been
able to use Blogger to record all the research, planning, work and evaluations
we have done through blog posts to create and look back on our music video and
2 ancillary products. This allowed us to store our work in one place and
present it neatly to an audience who are interested to discover how we came up
with our 3 products. It is an easy way for us to easily access our work to look
back on as blogger is a free site that has an easy and simple layout with posts
clearly layed out and easy to make.
During our research stage of finding out more on music
videos in different genres, we used Youtube to watch student music videos and
real music videos. We analysed genre conventions, micro elements and macro
elements used to create their work, and try to understand how they affect the
audience. Being able to view other people’s work helped us to understand the
how and why music videos are made the way they are, and inspired us with our
own ideas for our music video. Youtube was also useful while we were editing
our music video to give us tutorials when we needed help with Final with things
like editing backgrounds into the green screen and cropping footage.
PowerPoint and
SlideShare
For our research we also used PowerPoints to record
information we researched, and present it in a simple and tidy manner for us
and an audience to understand clearly if we were to present it. Powerpoint has
also helped us to present our information in an interesting way to keep an
audience engaged by using different slide designs, transitions between slides
and using different colours. It has come in useful to use as we could bring up
different and detailed points on separate slides, with the ability to use pictures
and add hyperlinks to videos to illustrate and back them up. The internet site
SlideShare was of great help to enable us to upload our powerpoints to our blog
for us and the audience to easily find and look at. 
Flickr
When making blog posts on Blogger, sometimes we had the problem
of photo’s/images being too big to upload through Blogger, so we used the
website Flickr to upload big photo’s/images such as our digipack and magazine
advert. Photos could then be easily shared to our blog posts by embedding the
photos and pasting the link into a blog post. This gave us high quality images
in good size and format. 
By using the search engine ‘Google,’ we were able to easily find
specific research or websites we were looking for by just typing it in the
search box and scanning through the suggestions. Google also provides many
images that we needed of things such as other artists, album covers and logo’s
of websites or other companies to support our points made in our blog posts. We
also found Google maps helpful to take a closer look at locations we could film
in, and then used the Mac to take a snap shot picture of the location, so we
could post it on our blog and use it to illustrate our points on why we choose
the location for our music video.
Twitter
Camcorder and
tripod
Without the
camcorder, there would be no music video. The camcorder we used was a HD camera
to shoot high quality footage to make our music video look professional. It
also has a light weight to enable us to easily carry and move it for shots like
handheld movement or pans. All the footage then saves on an SD card which we
could easily put into the computer and copy the footage onto Final Cut.
However, there was the risk of the battery dying during filming which could
have interfered with our work. Thankfully this did not happen, and there were
spare batteries for the camcorder incase this was the case.
To make our
work even better, we used a tripod to get neat and steady shots. This was one
of the technologies we used that were not digital, but it was very helpful to
make our camera work look professional by attaching a screw mechanism onto the
camera, and then locking that into place on the tripod. It held the camera very
still for basic camera shots, and then produced smooth movement for things like
dolly shots when moving the top part of the tripod that the camera was attached
to.
Green screen
This was the first time that any of us had used the green
screen before. Before using it, we watched a tutorial on YouTube and asked
someone who had used it before to demonstrate to us on how to use it. After
finding this out, we starting filming with the green screen with lights either
side of it to ensure the footage would not be too dark and would work properly
when editing images in the background in Final Cut. After filming the green
screen footage and reaching the editing stage, we found many problems with
editing images into the background. In some shots there are green outlines left
around the artist that we could not remove properly and sometimes the images in
the background came through in patches on the artist that were also hard to get
rid of. The green screen was the most problematic aspect we faced when
producing our 3 products.
Fairy Lights
In part of our music video, we used footage of pink and blue
coloured lights by placing it on top of green screen footage. We used the
camcorder to zoom in on the lights, and we recorded them against the green
screen so we could add a black background to make the lights stand out. They
contributed as a background of our idea on using lights and colours for our
music video.
Camera For the Digipack and magazine advert, we used a HD digital camera to take high quality photos to give a professional look to these products. Having high quality photos would also allow us to blow up the images to bigger sizes without the image pixelating (the magazine advert would rely on camera quality as it has to be made into A4 size or even bigger if it were printed on a poster). It is also easy to transfer photos from the camera to the computer, as the photos store on an SD card like the camcorder which can be easily inserted into the computer via an SD card slot.
Final Cut
This program is very important to actually put the footage for
our music video together, but put it together in an interesting format be cutting
it to the beat of the music. It allows anyone to take pieces of footage and manipulate
them in my many ways using things from transitions, effects, text etc. In our
music video, we used these 2 tools a lot to change the appearance of our work: colour
corrector and chroma key. Colour corrector allowed us to change our clips to many
different colours to make them vivid and engaging, and chroma key was used to
put backgrounds onto green screen footage. We also used a transition called
dissolve a lot as it softly faded from one clip to another to add to the soft
tone of the sad R’n’B we worked with. However, this software isn’t the best for
creating professional green screen backgrounds, so this affected our music
video’s quality. Despite this, what was helpful about it compared to other
software like Windows Movie Maker, is that you could have a lot more timelines
to add more footage without having to move the parts you had already edited.
This saved us some time to complete our work, but we still struggled for time
in the end due to sudden idea changes during the project. 
Photoshop was another major program we used to make our
Digipack and magazine advert. Like Final Cut, it gives you lots of different
tools and effects to manipulate or create images to create professional and eye-catching
pieces of work. For our Digipack and magazine advert, we used it to change the
colour of photos into bright colours, sepia and black and white. We also created
designs on top of the photos for both products by using an easy line tool to
create our Andy Warhol inspired look with the square shapes. Photoshop has a
great range of different text fonts to suit different moods, genres or ideas.
We choose a bold and modern font to connote the artist’s youth and vibrant personality
to attract our teenage/young adult audience. It also has advantages with the
way it allows you to use as many layers as needed. If something goes wrong
during designing, the layer can simply be deleted and not affect the overall
image. Having used it before, I was confident with using it so time was not
wasted trying to find out how to work it. 
During our research, we used word to type down research or
write our evaluations on our 3 products before putting them on the blog. This
was useful to use to create first drafts and enable us to easily transfer our
work to memory sticks or by e-mail to work on. Word also has many tools to change
the presentation of written work to make it more formal, engaging and
understandable. These include tools such as underline, bold, different text
formats and the ability to include images to illustrate points made.
Prezi
Lastly, I used the website Prezi to present part of my
evaluation on the music video and ancillary products in an interesting and easy
format for the audience to understand. Prezi is a website where you can create
brainstorms and mind maps of ideas and thoughts in a digital way; you can
change the designs of them to appeal to the audience the information you’re presenting.
I had never used this software before then, but I quickly learnt the tricks and
tools to using the software by asking someone who has used it before. I think
the website is very useful for presenting information professionally.
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