[4] - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout the project, we used lots of different types of media technologies, for planning, communication and production primarily. Below is a mind map of all the technologies that we used throughout the project:

Blogger

A segment of my blog

Throughout our project, we used blogger to post progress on our project. This was extremely useful as we could use our blogs as references later, or to hold resources that we may need throughout the project.

Research and Planning

Communication

As we had a lot of research and planning to do before the shooting began, we found that social media was very useful in staying in contact. The most useful aspect of this was that we made a group on Facebook for posting questions to the group and for progress updates, as well as having a little group chat for less important things. It was due to technologically converged products such as smartphones (which we all own), that everyone was easily reachable at most times if there was anything that needed discussing.

the top of our Facebook group

an early section of our group chat on Facebook

Facebook was used through our smartphones to access the group at any time

The Facebook messenger app could also be used to access the group chat

Props

The existence of online shopping made acquiring the various props we needed for our video much easier than if we would have had to go to different shops to buy each prop. The main sites we used for props were Amazon and GO International.


Picking a song

When we were all individually choosing songs as possible choices for the music video, I used Spotify and iTunes. These were particularly useful because if I had an idea of a song, both could suggest similar songs, which may have reminded me of songs I wouldn't have otherwise thought of.

my Spotify library

my iTunes library

Construction

Studio Equipment

The Canon 5D Mark II was the camera we used to shoot our music video, album cover and publicity shots. This was a perfect camera for us as it provided a high quality of footage, and was lightweight, which was perfect for our glidecam and shoulder mount footage.

The settings on the camera were also very useful for getting the right look, meaning we had to do less grading. For example, we could increase the exposure to make the background colour look more vibrant. One downside of the Canon 5D Mk II was that the autofocus on it didn't always work properly, meaning that big chunks of the glidecam footage was completely useless because at least one of the band members would be out of focus.

We used Arri Redhead 100k lights and a Leapfrog lighting desk. Both were very simple to use - the lights had colour filters on them which were easily changeable using the lighting desk. The desk had sliders to change the intensity of the lights as well as the colour filter over them. We could also save pre-set lighting setups to the computer, meaning we could easily set up the studio at the start of each shoot.

me saving a lighting setup

Whilst I can find no real flaws in the lighting desk, there were some downsides to the lights. The position and focus of the lights had to be adjusted manually, meaning when another group had been in the studio before us, we would have to reset the lights manually back to their positions. This was very difficult to get exactly the same each time, as well as taking up precious shooting time. Also, some of the colour filters were not aligned properly, meaning it was hard to get a consistent background colour, which was an issue, but we could resolve this during grading.

Editing

During editing, we used Adobe Premiere Pro to cut our shots together into a music video. This was a very effective software as it allowed us to easily trim our clips and put them into a visible timeline.

Website

We used Wix to create our website. This was fantastic as it meant that we didn't have to know HTML code whilst still making a professional-looking website. It was very easy for adding any type of medium into the website, and was very user-friendly. The bar on the left hand side of each page meant that it was very easy to customise our website, which was very important for us as we had to establish a clear branding through the website.

One downside of Wix was that it crashed when opened in Google Chrome, which meant we had to be careful as to which browser we were using. Also, if more than one of us opened our website at the same time to edit it, one of us wouldn't be able to save, meaning we had to make sure we communicated effectively to avoid work being lost.

Wix had some preset layouts that really helped when creating effective pages, such as the store page and the gallery pages.

Evaluation

Throughout this evaluation, different technologies have helped me a lot to gain information as well as present information. Below are a few of them and how they have helped.

Surveymonkey

To get some audience feedback, we decided to create an online survey using Surveymonkey. This is a website that allows users to create their own survey and for anyone to answer. This was very useful as it meant we could potentially get a very wide range of people answering our survey. Whilst free users can only post 10 questions, this was not much of an issue for the type of feedback we were looking for. The results are all very visible, making it easy to spot trends or see what the spread of your interviewees are.

Whilst we would have wanted more of a range of ages, this was a very useful tool in gathering feedback.

Social Media

This was, again, very important, mainly for giving our survey the widest possible reach.

We posted the survey to our Facebook pages to try and get our Facebook friends to answer it.




We also posted the video and survey to the Facebook page and Twitter feed of Dog is Dead, the band who wrote 'Talk Through The Night'. We thought that this would help us get some focused feedback from our core audience, as the core audience of Dog is Dead is similar to that of our own.

Without social media, we would not be able to get anywhere near the same quantity or quality of feedback.

Gifs

I frequently used gifs throughout my evaluation to illustrate some of my points that couldn't be shown as effectively using just images. Whilst gifs are very useful illustrative tools, there were some difficulties creating them, as I had to often change between three different gif sites ('GifYoutube', 'Make A Gif' and 'imgflip') because of restrictions on some videos or technical maintenance on sites.

Slideshows/Presentations

These were very effective I felt in presenting my information. I could easily incorporate images and videos if I needed to. The web-tools I used were Prezi and Emaze to create presentations. Prezi, once I was used to it, I felt was very smooth to operate and was visually very appealing. Emaze felt a bit more cramped and less free to use, but it was very easy to insert multimedia of all sorts, which was useful.



On the whole, I think I used a very wide range of new media technologies throughout the project to aid me and my group throughout the different stages of the project.