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

We used a website called ‘unsigned.com’ to select an artist/band to create a music video, the reason we used this website was to avoid any copy right issues that we would face if we wanted to use a signed band/artist, an email was sent to the band, in this we asked for the permission to use the song. (Copy of the email). We then went onto YouTube to look at other bands with a similar genre (the chosen genre being Indi pop) to see what other bands had done and try to get inspiration for our promo, the band I thought sounded most like the colours was (‘Scouting for girls) .

During this process we had been introduced to many new technologies that we could use to present our work, some of these involved:

·         Moovly- this allows you to create little animation involving the movement of text and pictures with the option to add sound. The program is much like PowerPoint, but you can do so much more on it making it a better program to use. Moovly does take some getting used to as it can be very difficult to understand the first few time you use it.

·         Go animate- this program lets you create short animated sketches involving characters that you can create and design how you want, you can also give them a dialogue and have the option to make them mobile, the program is very easy to use but can be difficult to upload and save videos

·         Prezzie- this program allows you to add text onto a blank page, add text boxes and then ass transitions between the sections of text, Prezzie is very easy to use and looks very effective even though the idea is very simple

·         Moovly needs adding from home

The main one of the technologies I have used is moovly; this allows you to create a mini movie about a topic of your choice whilst you present, you have the option to let it run through or you can play and pause when you wish.

I feel that my shooting skills have developed from the last time I filmed, this is because I have learnt from any mistakes I made last time by communicating with my group more, we also had three cameras available to us on the occasion, instead of the one that we had previously, this allowed us to get much more footage from many different angles. Another skill that I was my photography skills, I had the option to use a high quality camera which allowed me to take in detail shot, those of which we were able to use as filler shots when necessary, this is another thing I had learnt from my transition from AS to A2, filming out thriller we did not manage to get enough footage so had to re-film, in a way this benefited us as we could get more and better quality footage, again we learnt from this mistake from last year and made sure we got enough it not too much footage so we had plenty to edit and try to make the video as good as it could possibly be.  

Also my editing skills have improved as I was able to do a lot more with this video than the past one such as cutting to the beat, this process works by getting a copy of the lyrics, going through them and deciding the best place to cut your shot, we didn’t stick to this plan as sometimes it is just better to look at the video you have in front of you and decide what looks better rather than just follow what you had planned to do without looking at your footage. I also used a lot more stop motion which gives the video a rougher feel making it fit to the beat, this involves taking photos and editing them together so they flow.

Another skill I learnt was lip syncing, this involves editing the shots you have in time to the song that selected, one major negative I had with this stage was the performance element of my music video, as my actor had not learnt the lyrics before he came to film he was looking down a lot, it was so frequent that there was no way I could edit around it, meaning the final product wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be   

To create the promo itself we used I movie, I felt confident editing on this program as I had previously used it before so was already familiar with the program, after using this I had the option to move onto final cut, I decide against this option because I was unfamiliar with how the program worked and did not want to risk ruining what I had previously created on I movie.

To create the ancillary product photo shop was used. We had the ability to use a studio with lighting and a professional camera to take photos with, but as we had planned to paint all of our ancillaries we decided this was not needed, the fact that we did decide to paint them all I felt created more of a challenge as it was more time consuming and we did not have the chance to go back and change something if we didn’t like it or went wrong.