TASK 4

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

PRE PRODUCTION
In pre production we manly used the internet as a research tool for digital technology. We used it for researching into inspiration for example, we used youtube to watch die ant words music video and to look at his website for inspiration. Youtube generated and influenced our work a vast amount as we managed to find ideas and other artists work to reference ours. On youtube many artists like Santigold have their own music pages, this meant that we could go directly to her work and watch what she had put online, like her album that we used for influence L.E.S Artistes and her song Starstruck.
We also brought a lot of our props on websites like ebay and amazons so they would come faster. We used final cut pro to cut together our animatic which was in the pre production stage which helped us know how our video would go together. We used blogger which is an online software to write down our ideas and plans and anything we needed, we were also able to link Presi and other websites to blogger which helped explain our ideas, this shows cross media convergences where they are working together.



This video gave us a lot of inspiration at the beginning whilst in the pre production stage when we didn't have a set idea. The weird dark vibe in the video gave us a lot of inspiration which lead us on to using the internet and finding other videos and website of the artist.
The last part in pre production is that we used a flip camera to film our animatic. We drew out all the shots of through out the video that we had planned and wrote about it underneath, we then filmed every drawn out shot for 10 seconds then cut the clips to the appropriate length on Final Cut Pro so we had a rough idea of what our video would be like and to see if the lengths of the clips worked. We then uploaded it to YouTube and Blogger so that we could keep an account of the plan.



PRODUCTION:
In the production stage we used the Song NX5 to shoot the whole thing, we also used our iPhones to take photos throughout the day so we could blog the whole day on our online blog. we also used white balance and lens changes. We used 3 different types of lenses for each shoot, close up, medium shot and wide shot. The camera was the same camera that we used for my AS thriller which meant that we new how to work it which made the whole process much easier. We used an Ipad that recorded the time lapse for the video, and a flat screen TV that we projected the shots onto whilst being filmed which allowed us to see what was being film which was useful because then we could tell if that shot had work or if we ha to alter or change something.



POST PRODUCTION
After shooting everything we needed for our video we transferred everything to a Mac book computer which we had Final Cut Pro on. This is a professional editing software which also has special effects which we need. First of all we used the data from the Ipad which recorded the time code so we could link up the shots to the music so we could see if the lipsinking was going to work. We made a very rough copy first and then neatened and filled it out. During the editing stage we learnt various different techniques on Final Cut Pro like using the blade tool which meant that we could chop the clips up to create the jittery quick cutting effect, we had this running through a lot of the video, another tool we used was the crop tool which meant that we could cut the clips to use the parts we needed. We also added in a little monster thing in the video for special effects which was created on photoshop, and then dropped it into the parts that we wanted it to be in. Also on Final Cut Pro we could change the lighting and colour to make some shots darked like the ones which we shot in the studio as we didn't want the colour to be too much of a contrast between the studio and wood shots. We also changed the colour of the clips to more of a blue/green as this gave off a cold atmosphere which we planned. We also had to make a website for the artist which we created on Wix which is an online website creater, we put pictures that we had taken on our phones and other digital cameras on the website, we also uploaded the final video to it and a CD digi pack which we used Photoshop which we created images, edited and combined them together. We shared out video on websites that we know our target audiences use like, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as we knew this was used by our target audience, this allowed the audiences to like or share our work which was a very helpful process for us.m
After we finished editing our video we uploaded it to YouTube so we could publish our work and see how many views we get and to see the audiences responses, we used YouTube as our selling point to get it to our audiences as we new it would work because how we found other videos to get our inspiration from. Our last stage was to film our directors commentary, this we filmed on the same camera (Sony NX3) we had TV in front of us in the room playing the video so we new that the talking would be as long as the video.