Evaluation - Question 4

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


PLANNING 

Using the digital software, specially made for Mac users, Movie Draft SE allowed me to plan and create everything I needed for my music video. It allowed me to create a professional-looking screenplay, so it could be read clearly and carefully by the actors. 

It was made clearer when writing the script because each conventional element within it was colour-coordinated. This includes the character name, the dialogue, the actions, parenthesises, transitions, and scene headings. Each element could also be accessed very easily, so the process was much quicker than if I just used Microsoft Word. 

Another great feature of this software is the ability to make notes on particular scenes:

This allows me to plan - whilst I am writing - how I am going to film a particular sequence. The software then saves the note and positions it beside the scene heading, so I cannot possibly lose it.

This note can be selected and unselected to be in- and out-of-sight, so it is not disorganised. So, I am writing a screenplay whilst also creating a shot list for the video. This was an effective and successful way of doing it, as it allowed me to have a clear narrative structure for my video. It would not simply be a string of moving images arbitrarily threaded together. It also provided me with a clear idea of how and where to shoot during the production stages.


RESEARCH 

In order to research what audiences want in terms of music products, I used SoGoSurvey - a website dedicated to online surveys. 

I posted the survey onto my Facebook page and many people contributed, which lead me to decide on what I should do for my music products. This is a great example of what David Gauntlett would term Web 2.0 - a new interactivity in the internet. There was no real difficulty in producing this survey, except perhaps exporting it for the public domain. There are so many options to choose from on the website and my knowledge of online surveys is quite limited. Other than that, there was no real issue. 

The main technology I used to research music videos, posters and digipaks was, of course, the internet. I was able to gain access to both professional and amateur texts that taught me how to produce my own. Using the website Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), I was able to understand what my song's genre was, its history, and what band s are associated with it. This lead me to the fascination with the music videos by the New-Prog-Rock band 30 Seconds To Mars. 

The most efficient way of researching music videos is taking advantage of what David Gauntlett would term Web 2.0. A key contributor of this is the video sharing website YouTube (www.youtube.com). For the majority - I researched the videos by 30 Seconds To Mars, who have a particular style in their music videos. They often stop the music in order to make way for a narrative. This makes their products more like short films than traditional music videos.

I took a lot of inspiration from this video in particular because of its unconventionally long duration and its dark and surreal content. Without YouTube, or any other video-sharing website, I doubt I could research and analyse these texts quite as quickly or as informatively. 30 Seconds To Mars also released a 'Making Of' featurette of this particular video, which provided useful insight into how music videos are made.

Youtube is the gift that keeps on giving!

The great research tool for Digipaks is the Apple software iTunes. On the more popular albums, a deluxe digital edition - referred to as iTunes LP - is available. This was useful in analysing and learning about how to make Digipaks. I'll take Pink Floyd's album The Wall as an example:

As we can see, the digital edition has a selection of options to choose from. You can choose to play the entire album from the beginning, observe the song list, flip through the booklet - which includes lyric pages, abstract images, and pictures of the band - or go through the history of the band. I took many of these features and implemented them into my own Digipak. iTunes makes learning about the album a fairly easy and exciting task.

The search engine Google was useful in researching Posters advertising band albums. I used the Google Image option and searched for different posters that could inspire me - from any genre. 

I could simply type in a band name and a variety of different posters of that band would appear. For example, if I type in '30 Seconds To Mars posters', this would happen:

As you can see, many images appear. Google was very useful at providing me with media texts to analyse and gain influence from. 

CONSTRUCTION

To shoot the music video, I used a Canon 650D DSLR camera with an 18/55mm lens. 

This was essential in the creating the look I wanted. It was a difficult transition to make from the basic JVC Everio HD camera because of all the Canon's advanced advantages. One of the most useful features is the manual focus, which was far more tangible and practical than the JVC Everio HD camcorder. It provided me with an interesting use of focus pulling in shots as well as focusing on particular subjects. 
Through the different settings on the camera, I was able to shoot in many different locations without the worry of white balance becoming an issue. The white balance automatically alters according to the conditions of the location. 

With this camera, I had full control of depth of field. This was not be an option on the JVC Everio HD camcorder. I tended to use a deep focus on wider shots and a much shallow focus on close-ups. Close-ups are for when the protagonist feels secluded, whilst the wides make the dreamscape seem far more expansive. Every little detail counts.

Final Cut Pro 7 was the digital editing software I used for the project. I have been using FCP7 for a few years now, so I do have a considerable amount of experience in the software. FCP7 provides a large variety of options on how to string your music video together - much more than iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. 

I used the 'Tint' option extensively to colour my images to make them appear more vibrant. I chose particular colours for particular locations:

The difficulty in doing this is that I had to make sure that the exactly the same colours were used for those particular locations. So, I had to maintain the same brightness, contrast, and amount of tint:

I could do this by dragging the 'Tint' tab onto another clip, so that the other clip would have exactly the same settings. This was difficult to understand at first, but once I did it many times it eventually became easier. 

Lip-syncing was much easier than I had anticipated. This was mainly because of my previous experiences with iMovie, where the audio does not line up exactly where you want it to. With FCP7, it is far more fluid and you can do almost anything with the audio. This is part of the reason why I included many different songs from the same band. 

With the audio, I simply had to line the music up with the actor's mouth action. This was easy from the beginning, without it becoming a hindrance.

Another aspect of FCP7, which I found quite difficult, was rapid editing in-sync with the tempo of the song. I had to cut and edit very closely in order to achieve this:

In this particular sequence, there is a rapid transition between the Bathroom scene and the Hallway scene. According to the beat of the drums in the song, I have included very brief clips of both scenes. This leads to a transformation, rather than a transition, from the Lunatic in the bathroom to the Lunatic in the Hallway. This was difficult simply because of the needed attention to detail. There had to be very precise editing to be involved and it took a long time to produce.

The hardest thing about FCP7 is compressing and exporting. It took me about a week to export the video in a good quality because I did not use the correct settings. It also took a large amount of time compressing the file, no matter what the settings were. This is because I have limited experience in Compression and I do not often look forward to the process. It was difficult to understand the Compressor 4 software program, so I just used the compressor options on FCP7. These are the settings I decided on:

It had to be in an H.264 video format because it allows HD quality video to be compressed to an adequate standard. It is also a good format to use when you export it for streaming online or to a DVD. The data rate had to be high to increase the quality of the compressed video. Any lower and the video would appear pixelated and any higher would make the video slow down. The image size had to be 1920x1080 HD because the video was filmed in HD and this format had to be widescreen. On this particular occasion, I had to optimise the video for streaming because I wanted to upload it onto video-sharing websites like Vimeo and YouTube.  

The audio had to have a Data Rate of 320 kbps and an Output Sample Rate of 48 kHz because otherwise the file could not deal with the high levels of audio I have used in the video. Without these high settings, the audio would sound deep and echoey. I have given the audio the best encoding quality for optimum sound. 

All of these required settings took a long time to establish. Many hours have gone into figuring this all out, which is a reflection of my basic I.T. skills. However, this experience has taught me more and has increased those skills.

Logoist was essential in creating both the Digipak and the Poster for that Digipak. This is a software created for both Macs and Windows computers and is a suitable alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop was far too expensive for me to purchase and possibly too advanced for my current I.T. skills. Logoist offered a far more basic program with the quality of a professional appearance.  

I did not really have much difficulty in using this program. It was quite simple to use. I was able to import photos, which I took from stills from the music video, and manipulate the image to suit my needs. I could change its colour, overlay text upon the image, move the image, and resize the image. I could also do practically the same with the text on the image. These features were all essential in creating my ancillary products. 

At first, Logoist was relatively difficult to work. I was not sure how I could alter the colours or how to do certain effects with it. However, to help this, the package comes with video tutorials on how to use the program. So, they were very useful when designing my ancillary products. 

EVALUATION

The blogging website Blogger was particularly useful for the evaluation. Here I can write digitally, without printing many hard copies of it - which are more likely to be lost because of human error. When it is on Blogger, teachers as well as peers can read what I have evaluated and judge it accordingly. They can offer their own input, which would help improve my evaluation.

In posting the music video onto video-sharing websites like Vimeo and YouTube, I was able to gain constructive criticism in how my video could have been better. The only difficulty with these video-sharing websites, YouTube is particular, is getting around copyright issues. They often threaten to remove the video because popular music is being used. This is particularly the case with my video because Brain Damage is a well-known song from a classic album. I have made the case that since I am not making any money from the video, there is no reason to get so cautious about a song I use. I acknowledged that this is not my own song.