Wednesday, 14 December 2011
Tuesday, 13 December 2011
Evaluation: Question Four
Blogger
For our coursework, we were required to use Blogger in order to keep track and record of all of our developments pre, during and post production.
Benefits
Blogger enabled us to neatly organise our work into a way where it followed the checklist correctly and, if we made any changes to one of our posts, we only needed to hit the update button. This allowed for instantaneous sharing with our teachers as they could follow our blogs and then give us recommendations on how to improve our work through the comments system as it is a web 2.0 service.
Difficulties
Some videos we uploaded such as the focus group and the final music video didn’t fit in the blog post guidelines, which made the blog look unattractive.Prezzi
We used Prezzi to create an alternative way of posting on Blogger, so that the posts would not be just essay style posts.
Benefits
Prezzis were a unique way of posting; they offered something different which made the posts and the blog itself more appealing.
Difficulties
Difficulties encountered include the graphic user interface being complicated and, at times, inaccessible. There was also no spelling check with in the program meaning that you had to proofread it yourself. This meant that human error could sometime play a role in words being spelled wrong.
Apple Macs
Apple Macs were the foundations for everything we did during our project. These contained all the software we needed to carry out our tasks.
Benefits
The Apple Macs had all the software we needed, to produce our professional media products. Websites weren’t restricted when we needed to use the websites for our blogs and our media products, which were a great help to us.Difficulties
Difficulties encountered whilst using the Apple Macs, include the inability to bring up the context menu without pressing two buttons, the keyboards which are uncomfortable to use, the inability to truly maximise a window, the inability for Safari to properly render HTML, the desktop that was cluttered throughout the project, the inefficient cooling mechanism that made the Mac extremely hot while rendering our project, the locking of certain applications by technical support, the lack of a word processor that matches the windows version.
Digital Cameras
These were high quality cameras that enabled us to create professional looking shots.
Benefits
The benefits of using the digital cameras, included their high quality image, they’re lightweight and their ease of use.Difficulties
The cameras had quite a short battery life, and took a long time to transfer the shots onto Final Cut Pro.
Final CutThis piece of software enabled us to use professional effects and editing techniques, in order to create a music video that was of professional standards.
Benefits
It had all the required tools we needed to create a professional standard of music video. It offered a wide range of different effects and filters to insert over our video.
Difficulties
The difficulties faced whilst using Final Cut Pro were those such as the software was quite complex to use.
For our coursework, we were required to use Blogger in order to keep track and record of all of our developments pre, during and post production.
Benefits
Blogger enabled us to neatly organise our work into a way where it followed the checklist correctly and, if we made any changes to one of our posts, we only needed to hit the update button. This allowed for instantaneous sharing with our teachers as they could follow our blogs and then give us recommendations on how to improve our work through the comments system as it is a web 2.0 service.
Difficulties
Some videos we uploaded such as the focus group and the final music video didn’t fit in the blog post guidelines, which made the blog look unattractive.Prezzi
We used Prezzi to create an alternative way of posting on Blogger, so that the posts would not be just essay style posts.
Benefits
Prezzis were a unique way of posting; they offered something different which made the posts and the blog itself more appealing.
Difficulties
Difficulties encountered include the graphic user interface being complicated and, at times, inaccessible. There was also no spelling check with in the program meaning that you had to proofread it yourself. This meant that human error could sometime play a role in words being spelled wrong.
Apple Macs
Apple Macs were the foundations for everything we did during our project. These contained all the software we needed to carry out our tasks.
Benefits
The Apple Macs had all the software we needed, to produce our professional media products. Websites weren’t restricted when we needed to use the websites for our blogs and our media products, which were a great help to us.Difficulties
Difficulties encountered whilst using the Apple Macs, include the inability to bring up the context menu without pressing two buttons, the keyboards which are uncomfortable to use, the inability to truly maximise a window, the inability for Safari to properly render HTML, the desktop that was cluttered throughout the project, the inefficient cooling mechanism that made the Mac extremely hot while rendering our project, the locking of certain applications by technical support, the lack of a word processor that matches the windows version.
Digital Cameras
These were high quality cameras that enabled us to create professional looking shots.
Benefits
The benefits of using the digital cameras, included their high quality image, they’re lightweight and their ease of use.Difficulties
The cameras had quite a short battery life, and took a long time to transfer the shots onto Final Cut Pro.
Final CutThis piece of software enabled us to use professional effects and editing techniques, in order to create a music video that was of professional standards.
Benefits
It had all the required tools we needed to create a professional standard of music video. It offered a wide range of different effects and filters to insert over our video.
Difficulties
The difficulties faced whilst using Final Cut Pro were those such as the software was quite complex to use.
Photoshop
Photoshop helped us create our digipak and digipak advert; this piece of software came in very handy when it came to creating these media products.
Benefits
The benefits of Photoshop, we feel were the fact that it was easy to use, it produced professional looking media products for our work, and showed professionalism throughout.
Difficulties
One of the major difficulties with Photoshop is that it can be very hard to use without prior experience or tutorials. Because of this, Photoshop was much harder to pick up and use compared to other products but when we got the hang of it, the program was easy to use.
Digital Audio Recorders
We used this piece of hardware to record our voices to be used with in a directors’ commentary.
Benefits
Benefits included with the digital audio recorders, were that they were easy and simple to use, and helped us create a clear sounding directors commentary.
YouTube
We used this video-sharing site to share our focus groups and our music video, and to analyse and research existing music videos.
Benefits
YouTube was an extremely useful website for us. It allowed us easy access to our own videos when it came to sharing them between the group for our own individual uploads. This was also useful for researching already existing music videos.
Difficulties
YouTube was blocked on certain Apple Macs and therefore was not always the most reliable website to use. It often required an admin to unblock it occasionally, which was inconvenient.
Monday, 12 December 2011
Update: 12th December 2011
Our music video is now complete, we are all pleased with the result and are sure that there is no more tweaking to be done. The video will hopefully be uploaded in the next couple of days.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Representation within our Music Video
Representation within our music video is quite straight forward. Due to our target audience being around the ages of 16-24 our actor in the narrative side of the video belonged to this age group. The performance side of the video also matched our target audience by pleasing the musicians and traditional rock fans who enjoy performance in a rock music video.
Character costume was something we focused on quite a lot when preparing and filming our video. We kept our actors costume smart and suitable whilst paying close attention to colours. His clothing was kept dark to portray his emotion, the lyrics through visuals and to follow typical conventions of the rock genre. The band also wore mainly dark clothing, mimicking that of other rock bands.
Our actor was also portrayed in a dark light the majority of the time, we also added a colour correction and vignette borders to the majority of our shots to darken shots and again reinforce the tone of the lyrics and the gener.
Character costume was something we focused on quite a lot when preparing and filming our video. We kept our actors costume smart and suitable whilst paying close attention to colours. His clothing was kept dark to portray his emotion, the lyrics through visuals and to follow typical conventions of the rock genre. The band also wore mainly dark clothing, mimicking that of other rock bands.
Our actor was also portrayed in a dark light the majority of the time, we also added a colour correction and vignette borders to the majority of our shots to darken shots and again reinforce the tone of the lyrics and the gener.
Tuesday, 6 December 2011
Evaluation: Question One
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Conventions: Video
During the creation of our music video we always kept in mind the conventions of music videos, specifically rock music videos. We followed a vast majority of these conventions during the planning, filming and editing stages of our music video. Two aspects we focused on that are present in the majority of rock music videos are, the speed of the shots and the colour of the shots. It was once editing that we mainly focused on these conventions, however the shots under the bridge were filmed with the intention of darkness. The speed of the shots was a major focus, as we noticed quick snappy shots were used in the majority of successful music videos. Colouring was altered after editing along with the short shots. We slightly desaturated the brighter colours and emphasised the darker colours, this came out extremely well and helped portray emotion and the relation between lyrics and visuals.
Conventions: Genre
Some genre conventions that we ensured to feature in our music video were; colours, band costume and band/performance mise-en-scene. All of these tie in together under the heading of mise-en-scene, this was a major aspect that we focused on throughout. The colours used are important to most videos, they are used as signifier's for emotion and we implemented this in our music video. The darkness for rock and the darkness for our characters mood. His dark purple shirt was a choice made be us in order to help show his depression and as for the band costume, dark clothes where used as a matching part of all rock performance music videos. Finally the location for filming the performance footage was a local recording studio. This mirrors a lot of rock music videos where the band are seen playing in studios, live or in large open rooms most of the time and we wanted to continue this trend in our music video.
Conventions: Digi-Pack
When researching various digipaks, from professionally produced digipaks to other, older, A-Level digipaks, I picked up on some re-occurring themes. Some of these conventions were similar however there was a large amount of variation between digipaks. I found that there appeared to be three main types of digipak.
Picture Based - Featured pictures of the band.artist on the majority of panels, front cover usually a picture.
Pattern Based - A digipak that doesn't feature many, if any, pictures. Instead an abstract or pattern design is present throughout.
Simplistic - These digipak designs often feature a single object on the front cover and inside are plain and smart. Usually a strict colour palette.
Our digipak was based around a simplistic style, our colours used were black, white and red. The black and white combined well to create a bold and strong design whilst the red hinted at our music video when the band performed there was always a red background and hue to the video.
Conventions: Advert
Our advert matched our digipak, this was something we noticed during our research time when we were looking at and comparing digipaks to their adverts. Almost every digipak and digipak advert we looked at matched each other so we decided to continue our already formed house style. The colours, fonts and simplistic style stayed the same, if not similar, and we are pleased with the results.
Appeal to Audience
All in all I feel as though our music video was targeted at a suitable audience and was well received. When our peers watched our music video we received some constructive criticism however the majority of reactions were praise. Therefore I feel as though our music video appealed to an appropriate and well targeted audience of whom complimented and enjoyed our final music video, digipak and advert.
Adapted Conventions
As spoken about before, we followed some conventions during all stages of our work, including; our video, the digipak and our advaert. The main adaptions were the involvement of a narrative aspect of our music video which you do not see too often in the rock music genre. This was a good choice in my opinion as it allowed us to use a wider range of camera shots and editing styles. Doing this also worked well when following the ideas and theory of Goodwin.
Conventions: Video
During the creation of our music video we always kept in mind the conventions of music videos, specifically rock music videos. We followed a vast majority of these conventions during the planning, filming and editing stages of our music video. Two aspects we focused on that are present in the majority of rock music videos are, the speed of the shots and the colour of the shots. It was once editing that we mainly focused on these conventions, however the shots under the bridge were filmed with the intention of darkness. The speed of the shots was a major focus, as we noticed quick snappy shots were used in the majority of successful music videos. Colouring was altered after editing along with the short shots. We slightly desaturated the brighter colours and emphasised the darker colours, this came out extremely well and helped portray emotion and the relation between lyrics and visuals.
Conventions: Genre
Some genre conventions that we ensured to feature in our music video were; colours, band costume and band/performance mise-en-scene. All of these tie in together under the heading of mise-en-scene, this was a major aspect that we focused on throughout. The colours used are important to most videos, they are used as signifier's for emotion and we implemented this in our music video. The darkness for rock and the darkness for our characters mood. His dark purple shirt was a choice made be us in order to help show his depression and as for the band costume, dark clothes where used as a matching part of all rock performance music videos. Finally the location for filming the performance footage was a local recording studio. This mirrors a lot of rock music videos where the band are seen playing in studios, live or in large open rooms most of the time and we wanted to continue this trend in our music video.
Conventions: Digi-Pack
When researching various digipaks, from professionally produced digipaks to other, older, A-Level digipaks, I picked up on some re-occurring themes. Some of these conventions were similar however there was a large amount of variation between digipaks. I found that there appeared to be three main types of digipak.
Picture Based - Featured pictures of the band.artist on the majority of panels, front cover usually a picture.
Pattern Based - A digipak that doesn't feature many, if any, pictures. Instead an abstract or pattern design is present throughout.
Simplistic - These digipak designs often feature a single object on the front cover and inside are plain and smart. Usually a strict colour palette.
Our digipak was based around a simplistic style, our colours used were black, white and red. The black and white combined well to create a bold and strong design whilst the red hinted at our music video when the band performed there was always a red background and hue to the video.
Conventions: Advert
Our advert matched our digipak, this was something we noticed during our research time when we were looking at and comparing digipaks to their adverts. Almost every digipak and digipak advert we looked at matched each other so we decided to continue our already formed house style. The colours, fonts and simplistic style stayed the same, if not similar, and we are pleased with the results.
Appeal to Audience
All in all I feel as though our music video was targeted at a suitable audience and was well received. When our peers watched our music video we received some constructive criticism however the majority of reactions were praise. Therefore I feel as though our music video appealed to an appropriate and well targeted audience of whom complimented and enjoyed our final music video, digipak and advert.
Adapted Conventions
As spoken about before, we followed some conventions during all stages of our work, including; our video, the digipak and our advaert. The main adaptions were the involvement of a narrative aspect of our music video which you do not see too often in the rock music genre. This was a good choice in my opinion as it allowed us to use a wider range of camera shots and editing styles. Doing this also worked well when following the ideas and theory of Goodwin.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Update: 2nd December 2011
Today after having all of our filming complete we checked through the video, adding and tweaking what we needed. Our video is pretty much complete now and should be ready for upload after one more run through.
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