3. YouTube was one of the most important media technologies in our
whole project as we used it for various things
At the start of the project we used it to gain inspiration for our initial
ideas. We knew that we wanted to go into the indie rock genre but
we didn’t really have anywhere to start off at. Once we looked at
already existing media products we knew we had a starting point
that we could use to get better and better ideas.
Once we had then chose the style of video, we again used
YouTube, this time to look at individual things within music videos,
in particular the style of band shots used in the genre of music that
we where using. It was important that we didn’t stray far away for
the common conventions of the genre as then our video would look
more genuine. We included shots including close ups of both
instruments and the band members playing them, as this was
common in the videos we viewed.
As you can see, we looked at videos from the band foals and
copied the dress style in their videos (skinny jeans and vans), but
we did not use the same colour jeans because we didn’t want it to
look like we where directly copying.
4. Photoshop was used for both of our ancillary
tasks, the digipak and advert, and it helped us
create visually attractive images that we thought
made our photos look better set for our
products.
The advert was the first to be finished but as
you can see, it did not look as good as we had
first hoped. We realised that we had made the
font at the bottom of the advert too big and it
looked unrealistic. We also realised that we
could have included a lot more information at
the bottom of the screen that we had missed
because of the huge font size.
5. This is our final advert and we feel like
Photoshop helped dramatically. Once we
realised the previous design was not up to
scratch, we quickly decided on what needed
changing. We chose to get rid of the
background image and have a plain black
background as we felt that this looked better
and more like an actual poster as it makes the
image of the band stand out more.
We also added various small elements to the
bottom of the advert like adding the name of
our company as well as making the font
smaller which we felt would look better once
blown up to a bigger image.
6. This is the site we used to get all of the
documents we created for our blogger onto the
actual blogger site. This allowed us to include
images on our documents and it was very
easy to link to websites like blogger, the site
we needed to incorporate with our finished
media product.
For near enough every piece of research and
planning we used the site to get the text onto
blogger and it was really simple as the method
of getting a file onto the site was a simple click
and grab from your folder on your computer to
the website. This included work including
music video and digipak analysis and things
required for planning for example out call
sheets and shooting schedule.
7. We used Blogger for the majority of the
project as a place to store and present all
of our work. This included all of the
research, planning, construction and
evaluation questions that make up the
course. It was very simple to use as we
used it both years for AS and A2. It was
important that this was set out in a clear
fashion so that people viewing our work
would not struggle to find each individual
part of our work.
The tabs Research, Planning,
Construction and Evaluation helped
distinguish which piece of work was done
for a specific reason, whether that be to
give us initial ideas on how to set out our
video or things involving us actually
planning our video.
8. Final Cut is the editing software that we used to edit all of the rough cuts and the final
cut of our video. The editing software was very easy to use and this helped me create
the video relatively quickly. I had never used editing software before but it was really
simple to pick up and everything was laid out so that everything was in a place where it
was needed.
The videos in their rough form where imported in the top right corner and it was very
easy to drag these down into the timeline. Because we where creating a video it was
also useful to have this timeline because it allowed us to do things very well such as lip
syncing as we could get the timings very precise when various lyrics where sung.
9. To get ideas for our digipak and advert
ideas we looked at existing magazine
articles which had adverts for different
bands in them. From this we got the idea
of having our photo against a background
different to the actual photo. This would
help the image stand out from the rest of
the adverts and was common within the
articles that we looked at.
In particular we looked at an article of
Foals, the band that we where creating a
video of because we thought that this
would help us capture the band’s
essence.
10. We used Glogster to create the mood board right at the
start of the project as we thought that this would help
us create an idea to stick to when thinking of ideas. It is
very important to make sure you always have a main
idea of what you want to achieve and we accomplished
this with a well set out mood board. The image contains
images of all our initial ideas, this includes fire and a
sunset, two things that didn’t actually end up in our final
product, however they both link in to the theme of our
video as the sun represents the morning after the
hangover and the fire represents a fire that the teens
would be hanging around in the garden whilst drinking.
Glogster was very helpful to us as everything we
needed was on the page for us. The easy accessibility
of things such as videos, images and sounds was
helpful and it helped us create this “plan” of what we
want to achieve in the final video.
