Question 4

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

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

Screencast that shows how we edited our ancillary products: 

Screencast that shows how I edited the final music video:

I used a wide variety of technologies to create my production. During the research process I presented a lot of my work on Prezi, which provides a really modern and simplistic way to display written work that makes it more exciting. Prezi was especially useful when analysing music videos because the slide based system allowed me to separate the different conventions that I needed to analyse into an easy to read layout. Glogster was another technology that I used during my research. Glogster allows you to create a digital mood board with different coloured background and images which really made my research more interesting than just a written essay. It was important that my research was very visual and easy to understand, which is why it was better to use modern technologies such as Prezi and Glogster to present my work, rather than just writing long essays explaining what I had researched. I believe that Prezi is a better technology than Glogster because it’s more interactive and it allows me to cover several different topics in one go because it’s easy to section off the writing into different slides. On Glogster everything is presented on one large image, so it’s harder to distinguish between different topics which makes it more suited to individual topic research. I believe that it’s less exciting too because the themes are all very similar and the only way I could get it to work on my blog correctly was to screenshot and upload the final Glogster as an image file, which gets rid of all the panning and zooming interaction. I also used Keynote to present some of my analysis and I uploaded a screenshot of each slide onto my blog. I really like using Keynote to present my work because they’re simple to create and they look very visually appealing with a wide variety of themes to choose from. I used Keynote to link music video theories into an existing music video; Lana Del Rey’s “Music to Watch Boys to”. I already knew how to use all of these technologies from AS level, so it was very simple for me to apply my knowledge to A2 and I feel that my research is much more visually appealing and easy to understand because of it.

I used two different cameras to film the production this year, the first was a Canon DSLR and the other was my iPhone 6. I decided to use two cameras so that I had greater diversity when filming and it allowed me to get more inventive with my shots and how I was composing them. The DSLR is extremely high quality, with an option to use auto or manual focus and there’s even optical image stabilisation. This meant that all of the shots taken on the DSLR were extremely clear and crisp. I used a tripod in conjuncture with the DSLR so that the shots were very stable, but I wanted variation in the shots so I took all of the shots on the iPhone handheld so that the video didn’t look too staged. All of the miming shot were captured on the DSLR because I wanted the audience to really see and get connected to the actress and her miming. The DSLR was able to focus really well on the close up miming shots, showing high amounts of detail and depth of field, this made the production look more professional. I also used the manual focus on the DSLR to create various focus pull shots which really added another layer to the video and I feel made the objects I focused on more interesting. I used the iPhone 6 in a very creative way, constantly moving the camera around and panning whilst I was filming. I feel that the contrast between the still miming shots and the constantly moving close up and walking shots really made the music video feel much faster paced, which keeps the audience hooked on the video. One drawback I found with the iPhone is that it sometimes would over expose the shots and there would be some pixilation in busier shots, such as when the actress was walking down the road and the wind was blowing her hair. I found the DSLR somewhat unwieldy to use when moving around, so I didn’t take many shots off the tripod. I also felt that the optical image stabilisation on the DSLR wasn’t very good for handheld shots, and the shots still came out too shaky compared to the digitally stabilised shots on the iPhone.

I used iMovie to edit my production again this year because I just wanted to get straight into editing rather than have to learn a completely new program. Since I last used iMovie there have been significant updates and lots of new professional features have been added such as the ability to choose how long overlay shots fade in and out for and the opacity settings have been refined so that the shots blend better together now. I took a different approach to editing this year by putting the whole song onto the project first, along with a video that was the same length of the song and I then cut the one shot on the beat and then replaced all the cut sections. I decided to do it like this because it made it easier to move shots around because I knew exactly how long they needed to be when I selected them- this made for greater accuracy with lip syncing which overall made the production more effective. I tried using Adobe Premiere Pro outside of school in a personal project but I only had a limited time to use the trial, I found the editing software to be really comprehensive and in depth, but it was hard to understand at first so it would’ve been a learning curve in order for me to feel proficient on the software. iMovie on the other hand is really easy to understand and I could get started straight away as soon as I had all of the footage I needed. One problem with iMovie is that it doesn’t have all of the professional tools that other editors like Premiere Pro have, such a selecting singular colours, objects and a timeline with multiple streams of video and audio. I feel that I have developed my editing skills this year even though I used the same program, because I developed faster, more accurate and efficient ways of organising the shots on the timeline which allowed me to edit much faster. Because I was able to edit my production so quickly I was able to act on audience and teacher feedback quicker and I had more time for improvements, so I managed to improve my production twice so I have three versions overall.

I used my MacBook Pro to edit my production on this year which was a benefit in itself because I was able to edit outside of lesson and school time. I felt that using a Mac made me more productive because Mac OS X is significantly easier to use and faster than Windows, and because it was my own Mac I could keep all of my files on there without worrying about losing them or someone else moving them. For the ancillaries I used my Microsoft Surface 3 because it has direct pen interaction which allowed me to edit the images far more accurately using the touchscreen. Despite the Surface running a low powered Intel Atom processor I was able to run multiple layers and intense effects on Photoshop without it slowing down too dramatically, which is an issue I have found with the school computers. I was also able to install my custom typography onto my Surface which meant that I could use it on both my ancillaries and the video. I couldn’t use my Surface to edit the music video for two reasons, one of which is that iMovie isn’t available on Windows 10, and the processor isn’t fast enough to handle professional video editing- also pairing the slower processor with only 4GB of RAM, there would’ve been significant slowdown in response time which isn’t good during video editing.

I used Blogger to present all of my work, and I created two separate blogs for better organisation. I uploaded all of the posts onto one blog and I then used pages on the other blog to organise all of the posts. I separated my posts into; Home, Preliminary, Research, Planning, Production and Evaluation. Within these tabs I also categorised all of the blog posts depending on their topics. The posts are all linked onto the second blog via hyperlinks which redirect to the posts on the original blog, this means that I can upload posts in any order and they will still be organised, which is a huge benefit. Blogger however is very unreliable as a platform, with it regularly crashing on various different internet browsers making me loose posts that I was working on. It also has a very cumbersome interface with menus and pages not being very well laid out and it’s often complicated and time consuming to complete fairly simple tasks. Because I used Blogger I also had to use Google, which is the company that owns Blogger. In order to post anything on Blogger you have to sign in with a Google account, which I already had- this also applies to YouTube which is another Google-owned service. This integration of the three sites is beneficial because it means that I only need one account to access the sites and publish my work and it’s easier to share the work between all of the sites, with dedicated buttons to embedding YouTube videos on Blogger.