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

When choosing our song, we had to use a website called “unsigned.com”. “Unsigned.com” is a website where unsigned artists can post their songs for people to listen to, in order to gain popularity and attract attention.  By using “unsigned.com” there are no copyright issues for people such as ourselves using their music for our A level pieces. Once we had found the song we wanted to use we attempted to contact them by email to ask permission to use their song in our project; however the websites given to us were unable to be accessed. Unsigned.com is a social networking site and is also a place for demonstration of existing promos, a bit like Youtube and Facebook.

When conducting research, we chose to use the video website Youtube. This is because it allowed us to explore different examples of videos in order to gain inspiration. Youtube is a free website available to anyone with an internet connection, be it through use of a mobile phone, iPod or computer, as most music channels are only available on digital TV networks such as Sky.

During the construction of our music promo, we used varied technologies to help make the production process as easy and as professional as possible. We used two

Canon camcorders, Final Cut Express (editing software), iMovie, a Mac and stage lights available to us when arriving at our location.

When filming our music promo, we used a mixture of skills we had learnt fresh, and skills we had developed further from conducting our preliminary tasks. For instance, the use of camera framing, such as golden mean and the rule of thirds to film an effective shot.

example of rule of thirds in our promo

Another skill we learnt was to make sure our actor was able to lip sync the song perfectly before moving onto another scene of the music video. By doing this, we were able to make the editing process much easier, as each shot would be more recognisable for the part of the song it was for, and the lip syncing itself would look more convincing. Before we pressed record I would do a test run and change settings to make sure sufficient light was entering the cameras lens. This was important as we were shooting in dark conditions, using spotlights for effect. Not only this, but we wanted to recreate the lighting effects shown in the Mumford and Sons “Little Lion Man” video, with light being used to affect mood and add focus to certain shots.

Here for example, the light creates focus on the guitar in the “Little Lion Man” video, and we tried to incorporate this on the shot of the guitarist within my own video, by creating a silhouette of his face, as it was lit from behind. The spotlight behind (top left of the shot) helps to create a more professional aspect, and emphasises the reality of a real “rock band” at a concert.

shot from our promo

shot from Mumford and Sons- Little Lion Man

As well as learning these new skills I also managed to develop my hand held camera skills when we were filming around Stamford for the flashback scenes.

The editing process for our production quickly became a tedious process, however despite this I did manage to learn some new skills. For the editing process, we used Mac’s provided by the school, on programmes such as iMovie and completing certain effects on Final Cut Express, which was new to me. Using this software I learnt how to use the programme final cut in order to create layers and split screens. I used this method to create the shot of the guitarist with the girl on top, and also the shot with both the singer and a flashback of the girl leaving, to add a more professional view to our promo, and in order to gain experience on a more complicated editing programme, as iMovie is very basic and we were unable to create the image we desired;

Despite using a lot of technical devices, we did encounter some problems during the filming of our promo. The camera life was not adequate for a whole days filming, meaning we had to charge the camera whilst filming our performance side of the video at Stamford Art’s Centre. To get round this issue, we decided to only use one camera for the performance, whilst the other one was charging. In turn this made the filming process longer, but it meant we were able to film all the shots we needed to in Stamford on one trip. Another technical issue we faced was during the editing process when we had to sync the guitar to the track. This was harder to sync as the song uses a complex riff.

In order to create our digipaks, we used photographs taken also by the camcorders and uploaded them onto Photoshop. Using a professional programme such as Photoshop, allowed us to add various effects to our photographs, and insert images typical to digipaks (barcodes, dates, quotes etc) effectively and convincingly.  The shot below shows the transformation between the normal photograph and a photograph after effects had been added;

When the production is finished, putting them online on websites such as YouTube and Facebook is beneficial for receiving feedback from the audience. YouTube is widely accessible by people and is greatly beneficial to gaining feedback from a large range of people all over the world. Although Facebook also has similar benefits, exhibiting the promo on Facebook would only allow people that you are friends with to access the Video and provide feedback. YouTube therefore would be a more beneficial place to show the final production.