Will Hooper's Evaluation Question Four

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

Research

YouTube, Twitter and Facebook

As well as using old media (magazines, posters) when researching ideas for our music video we also used YouTube, predominantly, but also Facebook and Twitter to see what was being "trended" at the time. Each three of these tools are new media at it's best. YouTube was so crucial to us as we could access thousands of videos that got our creative juices flowing and allowed us to respond to things we saw, considering if it has potential to be included in our music video. Facebook and Twitter also played a big part as, at the start we didn't know what type of music or video we wanted to cover. So we used them both to see what was being talked about in terms of music- what videos were racking up lots of views at the moment in time.

Trending like shown in the highlighted section in YouTube below

Planning

There wasn't a huge amount of new media used in this process, however, on completion of our storyboards we created something that is called an animatic. An animatic is still frames taken from the story board but placed in time with the audio. This enabled us to get some understanding of how long each scene needed to be and also suggested to us whether or not each scene was dragging on. To create this animatic I used Final Cut Pro a video editing programme so it was literally a case of cropping the individual frames from the storyboard and place them in (kind of like creating an stop motion animation).

Construction

All in all, I used endless amounts of new media technologies in creation of the main text and ancillary texts.

MAIN TEXT

The element of the video that I am most happy with as it required a fair amount of time to construct is each of the layered visuals sat on top of the footage.

These are four images of a total of 8 all together. Each graphic was created individually on Photoshop using a series of vector graphics and texts. To make the images an overlay, I had to first set the background to transparent and then save the file as a .PNG which allows the image to sit on top of the video without distorting it or covering it.

Here are some other points we considered and problems we encountered during the filming process.

Use of steadicam

In the “metal scene” there was many fast paced camera shots which required a stedicam to retain as much clarity within the footage. Following this, for all the stiller shots we used a decent tripod that gave no camera shake.

We shot all our footage in HD to ensure our video was of the highest possible standard.

We actually used a HD handy cam, which was really “handy” as it was so compact it allowed us to capture shots from high angles without the use of a crane and also tracking shots were made easier in the preliminary exercises.

In the metal scene we wanted stobe lighting, however , we couldn’t source a strobe light in time.

We made do with flicking the room light on and off to create a similar effect.

Green screen issue

Due to poor lighting when we shot the “childrens show” scene the green screen overlay was patchy and didn’t look effective so we chose to just leave the backdrop green. Which in hindsight actually doesn’t too bad at all.