How did you use media
technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Unsigned
In order to ensure that no copyright rules were
breached during the process of creating our music promo, we needed to find an
unsigned band which we could then chose a track from. After looking at many
different websites in order to find the right band, we looked on www.unsigned.com and filtered the search to
“indie” in order to find a band appropriate of our preferred genre. This
website gave us a wide range of hy-brid indie genre’s such as indie-pop,
indie-rock etc and found us “4kicks”.
We used Twitter in order to post our music promo
where a large audience could view it. On this website you can “retweet” an
existing product, which enabled our video to being to spread around many people
all over surrounding areas. This gave us a strong indication in the speed of
which things can be spread due to social networking sites. It also allowed us
to get a lot of feedback from many different types of people from a range of
ages, a range of social classes and people into all types of different hobbies.
This gave us a large scale response on our editing techniques the overall look
of the promo and the mood in which it created. Responses from our target market
gave us a clear indication of the good (and occasionally not so good) things we
did in order to create a successful music promo of the indie genre.
Youtube
We used Youtube throughout the planning of
our media promo. Due to not being able to find the recorded track on any
website other than the unsigned website, we needed to be able to detach the
audio in order to get our band to learn guitar riffs, drum patterns and the
lyrics to the song. Luckily, we had found another Alevel media music promo . They
had already done the task in previous years. This allowed us to detach the
audio from their video, and save it as a new track to play through the song
learning process, and the filming process in order to keep everything on time
and avoid sloppy camera footage. Every part of the process needed to be
polished and films as clearly and as well as possible and so getting the track
was a vital part of our filming success.
Photoshop
We used photoshop to create our digipak and
magazine advert. This programme has a very large range of different effects
which we tried out and to see how they all create different effects to photos.
This allowed us to come up with the idea of keeping parts of our photo’s black
and white, with aspects of strong colour on key parts of the band. Photo shop
allowed us to use trial and error to create successful ancillary tasks which
will demand our audience’s attention and make them potentially buy our
products. After designing our digipak and magazine article, we could also keep
revisiting them in order to continually improve them.
Final Cut
We used final cut throughout the process of
creating our music promo. We needed to do complex things such as cropping shots
to make them tighter and more accurate when we watch, The complex technology
allowed us to perform complicated skills which would be too hard to perform on
a programme as simple as imovie. We became very familiar with this programme
through the practice of our preliminary task. We had to use this software in
order to test more complicated edits. Having this previous experience we were
confident as a group that we could use it
to
our advantage.
Final Cut Pro
Within
our group, one of the members has their own apple max with Final Cut Pro
installed on it. This programme was easier to use compared to final cut, it
took a few lessons in order to get used to the new software however it seemed
very logical and easy to figure out whilst looking into it. The programme
appeared quite self explanatory and gave us an advantage due to many groups not
having such a programme. We could perform very complicated editing skills in a
short space of time due to the modern, fast paced technology being able to cope
with our HD footage without constantly freezing and taking a long time to
render in the way imovie would.
Blogger
By updating our media blogs regularly, it
allowed us to keep up with all of the thoughts and ideas which we have had
through the whole process of our Alevel media experience. By recording all of
our notes, we can see the improvements which we have made to initial ideas in
order to get the best possible outcome.
Throughout the entire process, Google has given
our group the ability to research into our genre, look into potential bands,
find us our successful band, and discover all of the information about the
music industry we’ve looked into. Without Google giving us the wide range of
different websites, we would be unaware of important information and be
inexperienced on the world of media when concerning music promos.
Things we could have improved:
Although
we tried very hard to centre our shots carefully without including any external
things in our shots, a small amount of things such as cardboard boxes, and
machinery from our warehouse location managed to get in some of the shots in
our footage. This added extra stress when editing our footage as it was
exceptionally hard to remove or try to edit out.
Although
our footage was recorded well, it would have given an overall look of
professionalism if we could of had the HD camera on both our performance
footage and our narrative footage. Due to having contrasting levels of clarity
between our music promo conventions, it is clear where the better camera was
used, making our performance appear slightly inferior to our narrative
recordings.
We also
needed to ensure each band member was performing during every take. If one band
member thought that they weren’t in the shot, they would sit and not play their
instrument. This wasted a lot of time throughout the day as the same bit would
need to be re-recorded.
Due to
our lighting being positioned in one corner, shadows on the floor were created.
As a group, we needed to pre-plan every camera shot to ensure that no shadows
of the film crew would appear in the shot. This would look very unprofessional
from the audience’s point of view as the camera crew are supposed to remain
invisible throughout a music promo.
Using
such a wide range of technology has given me the confidence to be able to go
out and perform other media tasks. If in my free time I wanted to create
or edit something, I would feel
confident and excited to use different technology to my advantage. I also feel
much more knowledgeable about the music industry and the way in which bands
become signed and exhibited, and how to target a niche-market appropriately to
experience the best possible response.
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