Freya Catmur-Hill's Evaluation - Question Four

Question 4 – How did you use new media technologies in the research, planning and construction and evaluation?

Over the duration of this project we used a lot of technological equipment. At the early stages of production when planning our work we look a lot on YouTube to get ideas of existing media products and look at the conventions of our products genre. We also looked at past blogs created by students on the same course as us. This gave us in insight onto what we could achieve doing. We also could use ideas that we saw. For example in our video on the phrase ‘Your love pours down on me surround me like a waterfall’ we saw in Beyoncé’s video a shot of water pouring onto her and we used this idea.

In the production stage of our video we used two different types of camera, with this we also had to use a tripod. For shooting most of our video we used a Sanyo HD camera which was fairly easy to use but also had a white balance feature which helped make all the colours look realistic. Using the tripod was good for shooting at angles and keeping the camera still but I found it hard to do for example dolly shots without the footage looking very unprofessional. At one point in our video we wanted to shoot balloons going up into the sky, when we thought of the idea we didn’t think about anything going wrong. When it came to shooting it, we realised that shooting the sky was very hard as the light wasn’t correct. We tried using a day setting on the camera and made sure we used the white balance feature but still could not get it right. In the end we has to wait until  the sun had gone down a bit so it wasn’t too bright .As we used stop-motion in our video we also used a Nikon D40 which had automatic or manual focus. Getting the focus on the camera got some getting used to as sometimes when it was on automatic, it didn’t have the right look to it. Especially on close ups it look a while to make sure we got the picture as clear as possible.

I personally had never edited on Apple’s Final Cut before so it was all a bit confusing to begin with. As Jessica in the group had, I watched her for the first bit then when I came to have a go I feel I picked it up very quickly. Cutting footage and moving it around was very simple. In our media video we used green screen which we wanted to put a solid colour behind. This we quite tricky as we had to move the controls around to get rid of as much of the green as we could without fading out or blurring the edges of what we wanted to keep in focus. After doing this had to make the colours behind with green otherwise they turned a horrible colour.

Taking pictures for our digipak and our advert we also again used green screen as we made silhouettes we also used a basic bounce light. We had to make sure the shadows weren’t going to ruin the picture and that the lighting was as natural as possible. Using camera by now was no problem we just had to worry about putting the light in the right place.

I have used Adobe CS4 Photoshop before so the basic skills I already knew how to use it but making our silhouettes was quite complicated at first. We had to first get rid of the background by using the magnetic tool to pick out the pixels around the photo to get as close as possible the picture. Once we were happy with picture we had we put it onto a new layer and used colour overlay which turned it to whatever colour we wanted which was black. Once I had done it once the whole process was quite easy and I feel we used these images as a theme to our music video. I feel I used the technology very well throughout our piece and enjoyed doing it. Editing I have always found fun and think that with the help of my group we used it very well.


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