Our Album Cover
Our Website
www.wix.com/latymermediamv3/knyt
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Q4 How did you use new media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages ?
New media technologies have been vital throughout this project as it has allowed us to do things that we previously would not have been able to do.
Without some of the new technology we used, our music video would literally have been a disaster. Various pieces of equipment and software have allowed us to produce a sleek, professional looking music video, album cover and website.
Research and Planning
Social networking sites and other websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Blogger have been a great help.
The group has been able to quickly communicate with each-other through Facebook and Blogger which was aided by the fact that we could access these websites via our mobiles. We were also able to communicate with the artist through Facebook.
YouTube provided not only inspiration but visual references that I could show the group to help them understand the ideas I had.
We quickly realised that there would be so much to do on the shoot so we asked two of our trust-worthy friends to come along and help us out. The use of Facebook meant that we could easily liaise with them and make sure they knew all the details of the shoot such as starting times, numbers of everyone involved and the locations.
Email was vital when contacting studios to hire. Convergence of technology made this process even easier as our mobiles have the ability to send and receive emails as well as Facebook messages. This definitely kept everyone in the group up to date with the goings on of the project.
Construction
New media technologies have really taken the forefront during this stage. As we wanted to create a glossy, modern music video, it was essential that the video was crisp and of high quality. This year, we were lucky to be able to use a Sony HD camera as it let us film in the high definition that we had wanted.
The camera let us change the focus of a shot manually by the simple turning off a scroll on the side of it. This meant that we could create variety in the shots.
We also wanted to have high quality images on the album and website so we used a Sony DS3H50 stills camera. By using this camera, we had high quality images that would stand out on the website and could be edited without worrying about low quality.
We also filmed the shoot for most of the day using one of the smaller Sony DV cameras which provided us with backstage footage used on the website.
The fact that we had hired out a studio for this project meant that we had access to professional lights as well as a smoke machine.
However, we were quite inexperienced with the smoke machine which meant that some shots were overwhelmed with smoke and totally unusable.
We were unaware that to correctly light the set, we needed three lights; two on each side (which we had) and one at the back (which we didn’t have). If we had had three lights, it would have got rid of the shadows that caused problems when editing. It can be seen in the image bellow, exactly where our lights where in relation to the camera and how this cause there to be two shadows either side of Knyt.
Editing and post production
To edit, we were using the same software as last year which was Adobe Premiere Pro. I was very comfortable and familiar with this software, however using it to create a music video and an opening film sequence is very different.
This software was brilliant as we could use multiple tracks. This let us easily sync the footage of each camera set-up to the audio as well as create different effects.
This year, I learnt various new skills such as fade effects, how to edit the brightness and contrast, how to create a spit screen, using frame hold and Chroma Key.
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| Frame hold |
The chroma key tool was by far the most useful tool as the walls of our studio were far from white and we had to use a white backdrop to film on. This left us with quite a big problem shown in the video below:
Adobe Premier Pro let us crop the video and add white layers to cover up the unwanted studio background. We then added brightness and contrast to make the black and white stand out. The chroma key tool then got rid of all the “white” background and replaced it with a proper white background. This got rid of the yellowness that appeared where the white layers and the footage background touched.
The software we used to create the album cover was Adobe Photoshop CS3. It let us airbrush Knyt’s skin in the images which made the album look more professional as artists are never seen with bad skin on their album covers.
We were also able to change the colour of his top and create glow effects. It was extremely important that his top was purple as we wanted it to fit in with the colour scheme we had already decided on. Although, he was wearing a purple top, the camera caused it to come out look blue. Luckily, Photoshop allowed us to rectify this problem.
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| before editing |
We included features that most websites have such as videos, picture galleries and various interactive features.
I used Adobe Flash CS3 to create the logo seen on the introduction page. I have experience using this program and I feel that this software allowed me to create an interesting effect with the logo.
EVALUATION
In order to gain feedback from our target audiences, we used Facebook and YouTube.
We created an event on Facebook where we could invite people of our target audience to our screening. We made sure that the people we invited were serious and we could trust them to give us constructive criticism and be honest with us.
YouTube allowed us to send the URL to people to get quick feedback online as well as reach a much wider audience. We have been able to gain a global audience with people even viewing in the Ivory Coast.
During our screening, we used the big interactive whiteboard screen, closed the curtains and switched off the lights. This created a nice mood in the room and meant that everyone could see the video and was totally focused on it. I think this definitely helped us in collecting good feedback about our video. We also showed them the album cover and website after the screening of the music video.
Overall, new media technologies have helped us greatly throughout the project as we have been able to push the boundaries of last year. We weren’t as limited as we were in the foundation project as there were so many new things we had access to.
- Labels: evaluation
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