Evaluation - Question 4 (Axl Santos)

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

During the production stage, my group and I have used the Canon DSLR EOS 650D cameras to get footage for our music video and also to take images for two print products.

By using the camera I was given, it allowed me to take on the role as the cinematographer as well as the director. The camera allowed us to capture high quality images and film and also, I was able to explore the construction of each frame as we filmed. We experimented a lot with different angles to see what would be the best position to shoot a specific frame.

We were already familiar with the Canon DSLR cameras as we had used them before for our AS coursework during the making of the preliminary task and the thriller opening in year 12 so using the camera and knowing its functions was very easy. However One minor disadvantage that we faced was that the battery life was quite low. We had to carry a second battery in case our first one died however it didn't affect any of our footage since we already knew and planned what we were going to shoot so the battery life wasn't that big of a problem.

In terms of the pre-production and post production stages, my group and I have used a range of different websites and software when creating our music video and our two print products.

Blogger:

Blogger is an online blog website. I used blogger to post all the research and planning i did in leading to the making of the music video and the two print products. An advantage we had with blogger was that we were very familiar with this website as we used it last year for our AS coursework so we knew how to work it, how to make posts look a certain way and how to decorate our blog. Additionally, blogger allowed us to embed external pieces of work like videos, gifs prezis and audios. However, some of the disadvantages that we faced was that at times, there were some glitches with certain posts and it would ruin our whole blog by making some posts we created not appear so we had to delete them. 

Prezi:

Prezi is a website that we used to create a presentation for our 3 music video research. Prezi enabled us to create presentations in a more stylish and interactive way rather than microsoft powerpoint. The advantage of prezi was that work could be easily saved into an account so whenever I were to login to another device, I could still log in to my prezi account and load up work I saved in my account. Another advantage was that it was easy to embed prezi presentations on blogger by simply copying the prezi URL and pasting it on blogger as a HTML code, However some of the disadvantages I faced was that it sometimes takes a while for the presentation to load whenever you view it on the blog and so whenever I showed something, I would have to sometimes go on the actual website and show it from there.

iMac Computers:

The iMac computers were the computers that my group and I used to put all our footage and images in. An advantage of the iMac is that they were easily accessible as they were located in our classroom and also, we were familiar with these last year so we knew how to work them well. However one of the disadvantages was that whenever you saved work on a computer, it would literally saved it on the computer instead of the account. For example, if I saved work on one computer and I logged off and I logged in to another computer, the work I saved wouldn't be there. I would have to log in to the same computer i used before in order to access my work. 

Adobe Photoshop:

Adobe Photoshop is a photo editing software that we mostly used when creating our print products. The software was easy to use. It allowed us to edit image, add image, create titles and change colour and it also allowed us to move images and words around. It was a very useful software to edit image.

Youtube:

Youtube is a video sharing website that me and my group used for uploading and sharing videos. I used it a lot for uploading my preliminary task and thriller opening during year 12 and I used it this year for uploading our music video. One of the advantages of it was that since its public, we were able to recieve feedback from people we didn't know. Also it was easy to find our music video. It was by simply typing the youtube name we used for uploading the video "BallBoy57" and it could be located somewhere in the channel. However one of the disadvantages was uploading. Whenever a video which was said to be a big file was being uploaded, it would usually take quite a while.

Soundcloud:

 Soundcloud is an audio distribution platform that enables users to upload, record and share originally created sound. We used this mostly for turning feedback we recorded into audio so that we could upload it to blogger. The advantage of soundcloud was that it was easy to turn a video into audio by using soundcloud downloader and also, it was easy to embed soundcloud audio into blogger by copy and pasting the url as HTML code.

Final Cut Pro:

Final cut pro is the software that we used to edit our music video. We also used during the pre-production stage when we were creating our animatic. We were familiar with this software as we used it last year for the creation of our thriller opening so it was therefore easy to use. 

Green Screen scene. Background is a green screen.

Final cut pro was very useful because since we were going to do lip-syncing in our music video, final cut pro allowed to mute the diegetic sounds in the footage and instead only have the audio being heard. Additionally, we planned on having one scene where it required a green screen so with the green screen scene, we were able to edit it on final cut using chroma key and it was able to create the effects we wanted. 

Furthermore, it helped us solve some problems of bad acting since in one of the scenes where the protagonist runs upstairs, the protagonist breaks character and smiles a bit but with the special effects that were available on the software, we were able to hide the protagonist's smile and get away with him breaking character.

Special Effects hides the protagonist's face