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.