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.
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