Evaluation Question 4

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

New media technologies were very important in the research, production and post-production stage of creating the music video, digipack and magazine advert.

During the research and planning stages of the production the internet was a very important new technology. I used to internet to look at other music videos, digipacks and magazine adverts from bands in the chosen genre. Having access to the internet in the research and planning stage of the production was very important as it allowed me to get an idea of the key conventions of music videos in this genre, for example music videos in this genre often have a large proportion of performance shots. I was also able to see similarities between digipacks and magazine adverts in the genre, for example a lot of digipacks and magazine adverts use dark colours and images which will often link to the music videos for songs in the album.

A large amount of technology was also used in the construction and post-production stages of the production. In the constriction stage, we used digital cameras to film the footage we planned to use. Aspects of the camera allowed us to be more creative when filming the music video, for example having the choice between manual and auto focus meant that if we wished we could focus on a selected part of the frame to make that part strand out and show importance to the audience. During the construction of the digipack and magazine advert, we used Photoshop to put together the images we wished to use for these two productions, although the piece of software is rather complex it allowed us to produce something of a higher quality than we would have been able to create if using other editing software. This is because the editing software we used allowed us to edit the images in a number of ways which allowed us to create a professional looking final piece. During the post-production stage of the music video, we used editing software called iMovie to edit our film together, this editing software has some limitations however we were able to achieve the effects we wanted to in our music video.