Question 4

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

Research

For the research stage I used YouTube to try and find the song that we wanted to use for a music video, we looked through many different genres to find a song that we though we would be able to create a video for, using YouTube gave me a degree of control and choice that  previously people did not have, the ability to pause and re-watch as many times as you want. 

I used social media such as Twitter and Facebook to get feedback for ideas that we had, this allowed us to develop our ideas and incorporate them into our music video, such as the idea to have the setting of the music video by a lake and to have the photo shoot in the wood near to the lake. The idea also came from the bands name which features the name of a tree 'Oak'. 

Premiere Pro allowed us to experiment with various editing ideas for our music video such as the jump cuts used throughout the video which we used after I watched Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera which experiments with editing  and Jean Luc Godards A Bout de Souuflle which one scene is made up completely of jump cuts. 

Planning

For planning we used Timetoast to organise our deadlines for everything, this really helped us because it gave us targets to aim for with our planning, such as finding the locations for filming and doing a health and safety risk assessment, this gave us time for each individual part of the planning and meant that we planned everything in more depth than if we didn't have the timeline.

We also used Premiere Pro for the planning to see what we could do and learn more about how to use Premiere Pro, we quickly discovered that we could cut the videos but we did not really know how to use the effects. We looked at affects and we found out about the Ghosting effect which we quite liked so decided to use in the music video. We also looked at the Brightness & Contrast effect because some of the practice shots we had were a bit dark.

Throughout the whole planning process my Phone was really useful because it let me access everyone we needed for our music video and it let me post on Facebook when I was on the bus the dates for when we were going to film the music video, it also allowed me to blog  from a coffee shop when I had the idea for the digipak.

Construction 

When we were filming the video we used a Panasonic full HD camera and for the photo shoot I used a Nikon D3200 DSLR camera , I used the Panasonic because it was the best camera for filming and compatibility to the computers and software. I used the Nikon because I was used to how it worked. I used the zoom to get the bust shots and the close up of her face through the branches, I kept the camera on the auto settings though as I am unsure of what it would mean if I took it off auto.  

Premiere Pro was again used to edit. Because of our use in the other two areas we were fairly competent at using Premiere Pro, this made it easier in the editing process due to our knowledge in using the effects, this lead to us using some of the effects we used in our research and planning stages. We decided to add black and white to the music video to distinguish the two different sections. 

I used photoshop for my print production work to enhance and edit my images, I used the sharpen and blur tools to make my model stand out more by slightly blurring the background and sharpening her, I also tried the burn tool but after seeing what it did to my digipak/advert I decided I wouldn't use it.

Evaluation 

In the evaluation I had a look at a new website called powtoon, it is like powerpoint but you can make things more fluid and flowing than a slideshow, I used it for two of my questions because I enjoyed using it. What i like is how you can easily make everything move on and off whenever you want and I feel like I have more control over it than I do making a powerpoint. 

I used Blogger because I thought I would be able to convey my reasons and explain it more than I could using powtoon, prezi or a video of me talking, blogger is useful because it allows me write down in more detail than if I recorded myself speaking or did a slideshow.        

Question 3

Question 2

Question 1

In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge form and conventions of real media text?

Our music video is based on Bastille's Pompeii  video, where he gets chased through a city, we like this idea and decided to incorporate this into our video. According to Andrew Goodwins theory the Pompeii video is quite disjunctive as is ours. We also looked at the film the Wicker Man which made use of animal masks, which is where we got the idea for the masks.

We used conventions of music videos, such as lip syncing, which we used throughout our music video but did not use it all the time as this is normal for music videos of the indie genre, we interspersed shots of our artist lip syncing in between shots of the Pompeii/Wicker Man narrative, all of the lip syncing shots were close ups, looking back on this I would of tried to get more varied shots of the lip syncing as the shots were too long timewise and this would of made it look more like a music video. In the video Welcome Home by Radical Face most of the lip syncing shots are close ups but it does have varied shot types such as long shots and medium shots.

I made use of jump cuts in the video after watching Jean Luc Godards A Bout de Souffle which made use of a lot of jump cuts, especially noticeable in the cafe scene, and in the car scene, this effected the way I edited the video because of its radical editing style, where Godard just cut in the middle of shots at random intervals. I made use of this in the long shot when the people in the animal masks turn round I cut it as they were just about to turn around so they jumped round. I also used jump cuts because they are commonly found in music videos therefore are a convention of music videos.

As well as jump cuts I used other editing techniques such as overlaying the videos which I used three times in the video, I used this because it creates a psychedelic effect that goes with the narrative of the video as shown by overlaying the actress singing with shots of her being emotional and frustrated, this added to the video because it gave it a abstract and it distracted from the bad lip syncing/performance of the song by the actress, it also created a juxtaposition between the rest of the video as this was plainly edited apart from the ghosting effect when the actress turns round and is wearing the animal masks. these effects are not normally used in music videos.

Our music video had a Todorovian structure to it with the equilibrium being disrupted by the people wearing the masks, and being resolved when she wakes up at the end, but because of this the music video ended up being to much like a film with music over the top, with the editing not being cut to the beat especially when the people in the masks turn around, and there being to much of a story, on the other hand because of the story and the omniscient narration that the audience have, the audience might empathise with the protagonist, giving the a voyeuristic pleasure from watching the video.

The angle of the camera was kept the same which I would like to change now, different angles would of helped to give more depth to the video, for example the use of high/low angle shots to connote that the protagonist was scared of the animal masks and that the people in the mask new this and were using this to their advantage. A shot I would of liked to use more would be an over the shoulder shot although I did use this at one point an over the shoulder shot can show things more clearly, when the protagonist turns round to find her path blocked we see that we masks are there blocking her way, an over the shoulder shot would of been effective here to show that her path was blocked, or the use of a frame with in a frame, putting her between the two masked people connoting her entrapment.

Music Video

This is the link for our music video.

http://youtu.be/kYPRA_kmqHg