Question 4 (Draft)

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

It is required to use a variety of technology when constructing a music video in the current state of the industry. It allows directors and producers to be much more creative when creating their media text and construct a much more successful product if a bigger variety of technology is used within the products. For this reason I have used a large variety of technology to create my media text.

When I first started my project, I had decided to use an Apple Mac as the main computer for the majority of my work because it is the standard computer that is used within the film and television industry s well as the music video industry. I didn't see much sense in using another piece of hardware when an Apple Mac is the best hardware for the industry. The benefits of using an Apple Mac is mainly the availability o the Final Cut Pro software which is incredibly useful for software editing together video clips and mp4 files. I considered that I would have a lot of film clips to manage when in post-production for the music video; with Final Cut I could be able to easily see which clips I should and should not use in my final product. There are also a number of minor benefits to using an Apple Mac  such as being faster than a PC and the ability to make selective screenshots on a page instead taking a screenshot of the whole screen and then cropping it later. Macs also allow the user to be able multitask easily whereas their may be problems with multitasking on a PC.

 SlideShare allowed me to upload Microsoft Office documents into online presentations that I could embed into my Blogger page. The embedded documents were incredibly helpful as I was able to download and access documents that may not be saved on the hard drive of the computer currently being used. Specifically, cast members could download the call sheet from SlideShare and print it off instead only being able to access the document through me directly.


The web browser I used for the majority of my work was Google Chrome as it is the fastest and most reliable browser available. This enabled me to be able to watch back rough cuts for my product without interruption. I was unable to do this with browsers such as Internet Explorer which would often freeze and make websites such as Blogger incredibly difficult to navigate due to the browser struggling to run the website.

Blogger, was the website I used to present the entirety of my work. It used an incredibly simple layout that made it easy to navigate through posts of work and use a variety of formats such as videos, photos, and documents. It enabled me to update information about my product constantly without there being any issues. While Blogger is intended to be blogging site, I have used it as more of a website by separating posts into pages  (e.g. the research tab has work only about me doing research before starting the project). I have also changed the original layout  that was incorporated into the blog to make the website more smooth and clean for people to read and make the blog feel less cluttered.

Initially I used the website Pinterest to gather images and music videos onto a singular space that I was inspired by and would wish to incorporate within my music video and ancillaries. I went as far as to embed within my Blogger site as it became such a helpful asset if I wanted to reference a certain music video or image that I took inspiration from within my product.


When taking my own images, I used a digital camera for photographs that were going to be used on my ancillaries and I used my iPod Touch for any behind the scenes or recce shots of my production. I could also record video footage with my iPod which I used for behind the scenes footage as-well. I found my iPod Touch to be a very useful piece of technology as it could play the music in the background for my lead actress to lip-synch to. This would improve the quality of my music video immensely if the lip-synch was accurate to the song. I also used the iPod to message people to help me with the filming of the music video using the message app which let me contact anyone using an Apple device for free. 

The photographs that I used for my ancillaries were transferred onto the Mac using an SD card and all images were presented to me in Apple's iPhoto software. I also used iPhoto when I scanned in storyboards for my product using a printer/scanner device. iPhoto helped me rotate the images so they were the correct way round when they are presented. For photographs that were taken on the iPod I uploaded them to Blogger using he Blogger app on the iPod. The Blogger app let make posts onto the website without having to use a computer. I found this to be extremely helpful if I was unable to gain access to a Mac.

During the construction of ancillaries, I decided that I wanted to edit some of the photographs that I had taken. For this, I used Photoshop CS5.1 as it had the most tools available for me to use when editing photographs. I would specifically use the Black and White effect on all photographs that were to be included within my ancillaries. This was because it would link to the black and white effect I put on all video clips used in my music video in Final Cut. I would also lower the brightness on theses images after I changed them into black and white in Photoshop to make the images, visually have a much more effective and crisp.  I would also use the shape tool when creating a spine for my digipak so I could easily indicate how large the images for my digipak should be.

I also used the text tool to add information onto the ancillaries. I initially struggled to find a text that i found suitable for for the ancillaries. I decided to use a third party font from the website Dafont.com and chose the text Thailandesa which I found to be the most suitable for the ancillaries and music video as it fit with the dystopian themes of the concept well. Using the same text across all products allowed me to create a strong brand identity for the band. 

I recorded all of my footage for the music using a panasonic hd camcorder as it was a simple and easy to use device which would allow to film without any difficulties with the camera specifically. The footage that was taken with the camera was transferred over to the Mac using a 16GB SD-HC card and imported into Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro allowed to add in the Thailandesa text that I installed into the computer using the text tool. Specifically I used the title template to present the text in the video as this was the least intrusive way to present text within the video. I was able to reduce the audio of every clip in the edit manually so the song is not overdubbed by the audio recorded during filming. I was able to get the audio for the song using Youtube Downloader which let me extract the audio of a Youtube video where the song was playing and convert it into an MP3 file which could be imported into Final Cut pro. The audio would placed under the video clips so it would play over the video I also decided to use the stabilisation tool within the video as it improved the quality of the footage noticeably  as there was a lot less camera shake within the video. I also added various techniques to add in some visual effects such as the distorted view in some of the shots. I was able to do this by making duplicates of shots and slightly changing the timing of the edit and destabilising the duplicate clip. I then decided to reduce the opacity of the duplicate shots to create a sense of dream like distorted vision in the video. I would turn the snapping tool available in Final Cut on and off. I had it turned on when I was trying to put clips directly together but I would turn it off if I was trying to edit a clip to precise margins. All rough cuts during the progress though the editing stage was uploaded onto Youtube where it could be easily viewed and located as it is the most popular video entertainment platform in the world. it also helps that it has very good video player so it is easy to watch the videos you uploaded without any lag or poor quality present within the video. When the video was uploaded the time of the video over ran for unforeseen reasons. To fix this I used the trim tool in the enhancements tab in the Youtube video manager to make the timing of the video perfect.