Evaluation: Conclusion

Overall, we are very happy with our final print and video products. We think we worked well together and are pleased that we were both able to agree on song choice, themes for the video and the overall branding of our artist.

We think the style of our artist enabled us to be very consistent throughout our products and keep with a striking and definitive look for both. We also think that our friend, Sarah, was extremely helpful by agreeing to be in our video, allowing us to make her run through a forest in a cape and letting us cover her in face paint!

We genuinely believe that our video is quite realistic of the industry and we are happy with how it turned out, especially how accurate we managed to make the lip sinking and how effective the lighting turned out to be, in both the video and studio shots for our album artwork.

If we had to change anything about our project, we would like to have the opportunity to film on location with a better camera and more workable light, which would have perhaps enabled us to add more narrative into the video itself, instead of focusing, as we do, on the performance side (we are aware from audience feedback that some people found this boring).

However, overall we are very happy with the quality of our video and print products and the standard we managed to achieve in the time we had.

- Jayne and Daisy :)

Evaluation Feedback - Jayne

A great start Jayne!

Question 1: An excellent commentary - well done!

Question 2: Very good analysis.

A little more detail on your ancillary ( print) texts would be good here - use of shots, fonts etc...

Question 3: Excellent Prezi presentation - very good on audience research results and how you put this into practice.

Question 4: Be a little more detailes on how you actually used the technologies - e.g. colour grading in Final Cut, creating vignettes in Photoshop etc...

Also evaluate the technologies used - good/bad things? Easy or difficult to use? Created problems or allowed you to be creative? Did your skills develop over time?

Well done!

Miss McNulty

Evaluation Feedback - Daisy

A very good draft Daisy.

Put the questions as heading for each post.

Question 1: Excellent a well made commentary!

Question 2: Very good analysis.

Also analyse the images used in your CD panels -your artist pulling faces etc... pushes your brand image!

Question 3: Well used charts and quotes.

Don't forget to include your initial audience research and what you learned.
How did you use this information to create final products to appeal to them?

Question 4: Well used images throughout.

Remember to evaluate each technology used - good/bad things? Created problems or allowed creativity? Easy or difficult to use? Did your skills develop over time?

Well done! Miss McNulty

Evaluation: Question 4 - Daisy

Throughout our project the technology we used has been extremely helpful in making our products, both music video and print products.

We've been using an Apple iMac throughout our work, to allow us to get the professional quality that was required for our products and of the industry. Using an Apple iMac also introduced us to the programmes Final Cut Express, where we edited our videos, PhotoShop, where we edited our photos, and InDesign, which allows us to layout our photos to the appropriate shapes and places.



I found using PhotoShop particularly challenging as I had never edited images before, while I am familiar with editing footage. Although this was a step learning curve for me, I feel our work truly states the high quality that we worked at. InDesign was considerably easier than PhotoShop as, for most of the inside panels of our albums, it was all about the placement of text and images, whereas the Montage page was all about the balance between the artists images, locations and costume to take into consideration.

During our research, and parts of our planning stage, we used the search engine Google to find out information regarding the charts (to see how popular our genre was) and also to locate images of other acoustic rock artists. Google also became extremely helpful when finding the contact information for K T Tunstall's record label, for when we needed to gain the rights for her song four our music video.

In order to analyse music videos from other acoustic rock artist and to gain an understanding how to target our audience, we used the website YouTube, which allowed us to watch mainstream videos, when trying to analyse an audience, and watch other acoustic rock videos which we analysed for our planning, to help us locate our target audience for our artist.

We used two other websites to upload our PowerPoint's and word documents - Scribd and SlideShare. Scribd not only allows word documents but also allows PowerPoint's to be uploaded, which was incredibly helpful if the network ever made it difficult to get onto SlideShare. We used both of these websites throughout our project and have still been using them throughout our evaluation questions.

To create our PowerPoint's and word documents to upload to these sites, we used the programme Microsoft Office, which contain PowerPoint, Word and also Excel, which allowed us to create graphs and charts for research and audience feedback purposes. We found this easy to do as Microsoft is a program we are both familiar with and use frequently with our other subjects. Further more, I particularly feel that Powerpoint has allowed a great deal of creativity on the blog.

The main website or programme that we have used, by far, the most, is Blogger (this!) Blogger allows our coursework to be more accessible for home and for College, it also allows our work to have a more professional look to it as it is online and not printed out or on paper. It allows teaches us the ways in which we use the Internet and had powerful it really is for our education. I also found blogger extremely easy to understand and work, plus it allowed us to creatively show our coursework and research in a presentable way.

 

In order to update you on what we are currently doing, we decided to create small video diaries. For the later ones, we have used PhotoBooth on the iMac however, earlier on inthe stages, we used our own webcams on our laptops, which was perfectly easy and assessable as I am familiar with filming. However, during the filming for our music video, we used the brand new HD camera in the studio, and Jaynes HD stills camera while on location. Although the HD still camera's quality is not as good as the studio shots, they are considerably more clear than the studios location cameras.

(The HD camera)

(The Location Camera)

Other equipment we used in the studio, consisted of a tripod and the varieties of lighting equipment, which I am quite familiar with from my first year in Media and my most recent work on photo shoots. This confidence from my previous work, I feel, has allowed me to excel in working and taking charge of a photo shoot and deciding on lighting and tripod spots. 

 Not only did we use the lighting equipment for the filming, we also used this for our images. The photographs we took for our print products we taken with a HD Panasonic Camera, this camera belonged to Jayne and was the one we used for our location footage.

Once we "rapped" our footage and our photo shoot, we began our work on Final Cut Express. First we uploaded an mp3 version of our song "The Big Black Horse and a Cherry Tree" and then placed our footage along the time line. We then did a clean out edit, taking out the

shots that showed our actor forgetting her lines or dropping the guitar. Once we cleared out the footage we placed together the close ups, the location shots and the different angled shots into groups before placing them over our sound. This took a considerable amount of work as we were both adamant on making sure the lip syncing was time, which we find we have done. In order to achieve that part we gave our actor, Sarah, the lines to the song two weeks previous to filming, so she would have time to learn them and get a feel for what the song is about. We also knew she could play guitar so, in the music video, when you

                                                       see her playing the guitar, she was actually playing the chords to 

fit the song. Once we finished our video we rendered it (this made sure the audio and the footage was in sync and would be compatible to be exported, which it was.) We then uploaded it to YouTube and then embeded it to our Blog.

We used Final Cut Express again in order to make our Director Commentary (Question 1.) We filmed this in the studio with the HD camera with the studios laptop in front of us as a cue, similar to how they them on the News. When editing, we had to consider how long certain images would be on screen, whether the text was readable and the format which the other videos, that Jayne downloaded, and whether they would work. Again, once we finished editing our Directors Commentary (Question 1.) We uploaded it onto YouTube and embeded it on to our blog.


Out of the two products, I found using Final Cut Express and two footage based products (the music video and the Director Commentary) easier than editing images on PhotoShop and InDesign. However, one advantage that PhotoShop and InDesign presented was that they both had a preview button, which allowed us to see what our products would look like when exported but also showed us how much room we had, with the marker lines around everry picture blocking our view of empty space. Other websites we used, for both our print and footage products was Amazon.co.uk (we bought a cape) and dafont.com (in order to find different fonts for our print products.) We feel if we hadn't spent money on a cape, the fairy tale theme (a convention breaking theme, according to our audience feed back) wouldn't have eben as successful and dafont.com also allowed our artist to create a realationship with the audience, with her signiture at the end of the thankyou page.

Using the iMac and it's programs (PhotoShop, InDesign and Final Cut Express) took some time getting used to as I have only ever worked on PC when editing footage, apart from last year when I used iMovie, which is considerably different from Final Cut Express. I found using the computer easy, however working the programs was considerably difficult as they were completely new to me. I feel, however, that I have excelled and gained enough knowledge and skill to work PhotoShop and Final Cut Express though I feel I could work on my lay out skills in InDesign. In saying that Final Cut Express would often crash or act up if the internet was being used at the same time or if we had opened another program, such as PhotoShop, this was a difficulty we both had to adjust and get used to.

Evaluation: Question 4 - Jayne

Throughout the production of our music video, media technology has played a significant part in helping us plan and research, film and edit our final product and evulate the final result.

Our entire project was completed using an Apple iMac, a computer which allowed us to access specific programs such as Final Cut and InDesign, as well as the internet for research purposes, I find Mac's easy to use because I am experienced with them and prefer them to other PCs, I was therefore happy to be using one for this project.

When researching and planning our video, we used the search engine 'Google' to look up chart information, research artists and see images of other music albums and posters. Using Google enables us to find recent and relevent information about what we were searching for, and ensured fast results that we could easily access. 

            

'YouTube' also proved extremely useful in our research, as we could search for music videos. This provided us with the opportunity to watch videos of other acoustic rock artists to gain inspiration for our own and also allowed us to analyse these videos while being able to pause and rewatch them at will, or use them in our directors commentary. We also uploaded our final music video, directors commentary and all our video diaries to youtube, so we could embed them into the blog as proof of our progress and final product. Although 'YouTube' is sometimes temperamental in how long videos take to upload, it is easy to use and efficient for embedding videos into the blog. 

During the planning and research process we used Microsoft Office programs 'Word' and 'Powerpoint' to lay out our ideas. Documents of these kind became helpful when reseaching the conventions of music videos and narrative theories, as it was simple to make presentations about the topic before uploading them to the blog. Excel was also useful for making graphs to back up our audience feedback and word was useful when creating and printing a number of audience questionnaires. I have been familiar with Office programs for some time, so encountered no problems using these programs. 

In order to embed word documents and powerpoints into blogger, I used two programs - Slideshare(primarily for powerpoint) and Scribd. After the documents had been uploaded to these sites it was easy to copy the embed cope and paste it into the HTML box in a text post, meaning the presentation or document would show up in that post, which allowed us to add detail to the blog in a more creative way. Slideshare and Scribd were also quite simple to use, but the websites go down from time to time, meaning we were restricted to one working site. 

Blogger itself, has been used throughout the project, to document our progress, from the planning and resesarch stage, right through to the evaluation. With blogger I can make simple text posts, add images and embed videos, powerpoints or word documents from other websites. Blogger made it easy to show our creative ways in different and innovative ways, which also helped expand upon my technical skills, as I learnt how to show a range of different medias (powerpoint, word document, video, etc) through one blog. 

We used the program 'Photo Booth' on the iMac to film a lot of our video diaries, when we were in the classroom. This program uses the inbuilt camera in the Mac to take pictures or videos which we can then edit or upload directly to YouTube, which makes it very easy and convenient for our use. 

To film our actual music video, we used the HD camera available in the studio. This camera provided a high quality which made the video look more professional. The camera wasn't overly complicated and it's quality enhanced the lighting effect to get the shots we wanted. It was slightly difficult to film with a more complex camera: working out the right level of exposure and make sue everything is in focus. I think working with a HD camera made the overall project muc h more appealing. 

In order to keep the camera steady and place it in different possitions around the room, we used a tripod. This also came in handy when panning downwards from the artists eyes to her mouth.

The lighting equipment we used in the studio enables us to experiment with different lighting effects and how they could be created when, for example, the key light was moved, or only back lighting was used. This allowed us to create the spotlight effect seen in our music video and the softer lighting effect seen in photographs for our print production. Once we were trained in the lighting effects, the equipment was reasonably easy to use and place where we needed it. The hardest part of lighting our shots were keeping the equipment out of shot while still having the amount of light we wanted on the actress. 

When taking photos of our artist in the studio and on location we used this HD Panasonic camera. We also used this camera to shoot the on location footage, as it shoots video in a high quality, although it cannot hold as much footage as a regular video camera. I have a camera the same as this one so knew how to use it previously to the project.

Once we had filmed our footage, we used Final Cut Express to edit it together. Final Cut has many tools which allow editing of a high standard: including multiple layers of sound and video, transitions, the ability to cut and zoom in on different parts of footage, colour grading, filters and so on. We applied a black background to a few of out studio shots to enhance the spotlight effect, and blured the edges so it was not obvious. We also used the colour grading tool to give our on location footage a blue hue and create a more eerie effect. We also used Final Cut to edit our directors commentary, when we made the footage small and alligned it to the bottom left hand side of the screen, over our other footage. Final Cut also allows photographs to be added to a timeline, and text either on a seperate background, or over the actual video footage. Final cut was quite difficult to get used to as everything is much more complex than iMovie and obviously the layout of the program and where each tool is placed, is also different. Despite this, once I got used to the program it provided many more opportunities for editing styles than we had with iMovie last year. It was also easy to organise our clips according to the order we wanted them in the timeline. 

The directors commentary is the first question of this evaluation, and while editing ours together to decided we wanted to use actual video clips of the other artists music videos that we were talking about. In order to do this, I downloaded the videos we wanted from YouTube using 'RealPlayer Download and Recording Manager.' I then converted the filmes from .flv into an appropriate format that would be compitable with Final Cut. I did this using RealPlayer Converter, which allows you to select the format you want from a list of options.

When making our print products, we used the program Photoshop to cut around pictures when we wanted to remove the background, and to colour grade them so they stood out more for their purpose. We also used Photoshop to create the simple spotlight background for our front cover by moving the two different layers into the right position. Photoshop enabled us to create a vignette around our artist for the album cover, again enhancing the spot-light effect that we used in the music video itself. I find PhotoShop quite difficult to use because I'm not familiar with the program and don't know exactly what each differenet tool is used for, with a bit of practise though, I managed to edit out pictures quite well, although I definitely found it the most   difficult program out of the ones we used.  

InDesign was the program we used to actually put our album booklet and promotional poster together. Using the program we layered the pictures we wanted appropriately (which was particularily usedful for our montage). We also desniged our logo using this program, and all other text used throughout the print prouction. The CD cover template we used was useful in sticking to the size needed for each panel and we could easily rearraage things if we did not like them without having to start all over again. I had never used InDesign prior to this project so knew next to nothing about it. Despite this, I didn't find the program too difficult to use and think our print products reflect the quality we were able to produce with this program. 

Overall, we have used a great number of media technologies in the completion of our coursework. Each one has proved useful at different stages and even those which have presented problems have always been overcome successfully. I think our final products benefit from the professional equipment and editing programs used as it gives them an air of quality and makes them more believeable as real products. I found Final Cut easier to use overall than InDesign and Photoshop, but this is probably because I am already familiar with editing software and have a different version of Final Cut at home. I think being able to experiment with the print product programs expanded my knowledge of these sort of programs, and I would definitely continue to use them in the future. 

Evaluation: Question 3 - Jayne

What have you learnt from your audience feedback? on Prezi

(view in full screen)

Evaluation: Question 2 - Jayne

Question 2