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

We used a variety of techniques of media technology to construct our music video. First of all in the planning stages we used the internet as a secondary research task to find out more about music videos throughout the R n B industry, we did this by looking at the official “Cry me a river” music video to get similarities for our product as this was our chosen music video. For the research we also looked at other music videos to get an understanding of what a professional music video consists of such as the location types, props, and the acting style in some music videos, mise-en-scene and the shooting sets used around these videos. We used Youtube to watch and listen to the videos on the internet. What we gained by this was having to improve on our locations from what we was thinking of to something very modern as in the “cry me a river” video. Another media technology we used was television as some of the members of our group watched music videos on TV to get some more ideas about how music videos are constructed and what we could use and do to construct our own piece of art.
For the construction of our video we used many aspects of media technologies. Our main piece of technology was the video camera we used to film throughout the course. We filmed every week on an average then brought the camera back to the classroom where we connected the camera to the computer and logged and captured the footage that we were most likely to use. Once all the footage was recorded and was inputted on the computer we then edited the clips on a programme called Final cut pro to produce a timeline of the all the suitable clips in the order. We mixed the shots around and scattered them along the timeline but kept in a suitable flow and included the lip-syncing shots in the video where it is needed in the main parts of the song such as the chorus. For many shots we used effects on the video to make the shots look better and effective. For example we used an effect called washed away hence the name of the music video “cry me a river”, this tied in well with our finished product. Adobe Photoshop CS3 was used to create our magazine and CD covers and to also edit pictures. This was very helpful as you could do many things with the pictures by editing, such as cropping unwanted bits on pictures or even to get rid off a bad background. We used adobe many to merge pictures together and changed colours of the pictures to make them stand out and look stylish.

The timeline on the software we used is split into many clips join together to make one whole video. This software allowed us to do many stuff to the video, such as we change the motion in some parts by slowing down the clip. Some of the shots had lighting issues so we were able change the lighting and make the shot look better. The programme allowed us to add in fades in and out, the slide affect was used which makes the shot slide away and the next shot slides in. In the video an earthquake effect was used to give more effect to the video and make it look better.

For the planning we used http://www.blogger.com/ where we planned what we were going to do ahead like we will plan for the upcoming weeks for what we need to film or re-shoot. This site was also used put many posts up of what we have done or need to do and the evaluation of our course.
The media technologies we used in the evaluation stages was http://www.blogger.com/, Youtube and video camera’s to record the director’s commentary and a clip of the focus group we got together to get feedback for our music video. We used the Blogger website to upload pictures and videos about our tools we used throughout the course and to talk about what we have done since we started and also planning stuff on this site. In conclusion media technology is vital as this gained us to do many things throughout and we could not have possibly done anything there was no media technology.