Evaluation question 4

Whilst creating our final music video we used different pieces of hardware and software to help us make our final piece. In this blog post I will discuss what hardware and software we used and what we used them for.

Use of hardware and software in the planning stage

During the planning stage the main pieces of hardware we used was digital cameras, computers and iMacs. The digital cameras were needed in order to photograph the storyboard to create an animatic and photograph our progress in the planning stages and early stages of filming/location hunting. The computers were vital in researching topics, bands and tips for our music video.

The software we used was blogger, youtube and adobe premiere. Adobe premiere was used to create our animatic during the planning stage, in later stages premiere became our most important piece of software.

Whilst planning and creating our product the macs were good to use, however when using programmes such as adobe photoshop we found that they were highly unoptimised for macs as they were made mainly for the windows platforms. We found this out when creating out digipak and magazine advert as the software was very hard to use on it due to poor optimisation. By switching to a windows PC the process was much simpler.

Use of Hardware

The cameras were vital during the process of creating our final piece, digipak and magazine advert. They also can be used as evidence to document the different stages of the project. We used 2 different cameras, the video camera that doubles as a digital camera and the digipak photos were taken using an iPhone 5s which gave us surprisingly high quality shots.

We found that the picture quality from the iPhone came out better than that of the video camera which tended to come out a bit dark.

The tripod is a very useful piece of equipment and without it it would have been impossible to have a steady shot. It also gave us the ability to set a fixed height. The only problem is portability as it became a nuisance to carry around whilst travelling a lot, also as we created our product in the colder months it was very cold to carry. 

Software

Photoshop; We used photoshop in order to create our digipak and magazine advert. It was good to use on the PC as it is a very intuitive piece of software which gave us the ability to create compelling products.

Adobe Premiere; We used this to edit our music video. I found this software very simple to use and there are lots of effective and easy to use video effects. Using this piece of software we could create a very high quality video.

evaluation question 3

Below is the results from the audience research on our final media products.

From this we can see that overall my music video went down okay but not bad. This means that improvements can be made.

An overwhelming amount of people think that our video shots are way too dragged out, if we were to do it again include faster cuts and more shot variation.

We can see that most people might watch our film again, fro me I count this as a success as it is very difficult for a new band to penetrate the market. So these people might tell their friends then It will be viewed more via word of mouth.

From this feedback we can see that overall my media product was okay, not great. Around 14% of people said it was outright bad and a similar amount said they wouldn't watch it again. A big problem we had with our video appears to be the slow edits and long shot duration, if I could do this again I would get more shots in order to have more variety of shots to chose from and make my video look more interesting.
Overall i found this feedback very effective as I now know what I did right and what I should change if i were to do it again.
Below is the finished media product and rough cut;

Evaluation question 2

Below is a popplet that I made

Evaluation question 1

In our music video we made sure to include many different genre conventions in order to
make it a good Rock video, this will help us .
Right from the start of the video the first thing you see is a close up.

Above is the opening shot of my music video.

We used the opening shot as inspiration from the foo fighters opening scene in The Pretender. Pictured above. 

This isn't the only genre characteristic from the rock genre that we used. We also used mid shots that show the whole band, this is common practise in rock videos.

You can see a clear resemblance between the band shot from my music video and the foo fighters band shot. The main difference is their more impressive location and a slightly wider angle and more people.

Before starting our project we didn't know too much about digipaks so we began researching them and took inspiration from the Gorillaz digipak which is relatively simple images with colours over them. Something like this was ideal for us as our photo editing skills are very limited.

As you can see these resemble each other quite closely, but we decided we wanted a higher range of brighter colours.

Constructing the Digipak

I found the digipak to be one of the hardest parts of the whole project, this was mainly due to the fact that I find editing with Photoshop very difficult. To get the digipak to a good standard it took more than one attempt.

In order to complete the digipak i undertook a lot of research and in the end decided to use the Gorillaz's digipak as inspiration for mine.

I found this digipak very helpful when creating mine as it shows that to make a good digipak you dont need to use loads of different special effects, you could just use simple images and colours.

In order to create the digipak I first used the camera on an iphone 5s in order to get the images to use.

The iPhone gave us some good shots, which was surprising for a phone.

Next i imported the images into adobe Photoshop. I found this program quite difficult to use however with practice you can create some quite amazing things.

Below is my finished digipak; 

Constructing the advert

Constructing the advert was a long process that we found quite difficult. This was because we had very limited Photoshop skills, to fix this we needed to go back to it multiple times in order to get it to a reasonable standard and learn how to use Photoshop on the Macs.

To get inspiration for my magazine advert I looked at real adverts and the adverts from previous year groups. I saw that all of the adverts featured a qr code and a website, which mine did not so it looked unprofessional.
To make the advert better me and my group went and took some group photos for the main advert image, we then removed the background and placed the image onto a backdrop that matched the theme of the song. I then created a qr code and added a website to make it look like a REAL advert.
Below is an early version of my advert cover, this one wasn't very good but was a good way to learn how to use the Photoshop software.

Overall I feel that the magazine advert is okay. The band shot shows that the band doesn't take itself too seriously in contrast the background shows that the song covers a serious topic. There is an iTunes advertisement, QR code and a website link. If i were to do it again I would use a better font and maybe use a better band shot just to give it the "extra" bit of professionalism.

I would make the website a little smaller.

 

Below is the final magazine advert;

 

Storyboard

Below is our storyboard. Shot duration is rough estimate.