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

Media technology played a vital part in this project, it is used throughout the whole project in various forms to achieve what was necessary.
In the beginning I needed to choose an unsigned artists track to produce a music video and ancillary tasks for. This proved fairly hard because many artist that are unsigned are not very good. I had to use the internet and a computer to search for unsigned artists. I looked on unsignedbands.com for any possible artists. After using Microsoft Office Word to create a list of a few songs and artists that I found reasonable and had ideas for. This was then followed up by me downloading the music audio and then is started drawing up plans for the song, using a word document with a table once I had a story board written up I then created a shot time line in relation to timings of the song. Once this was done I could then start to research
   how pop music videos are shot, what their mise-en-scene is like and how the transitions are.
This lead me to a problem, I knew that this project was designed to demonstrate our ict skills. The problem was that for the most part the transitions were all the same... jump cuts. Which was a bit restricting which is why I chose to develop this convention of the music genre.
After I had decided how I was going to run through all the clips I need to make a list of things I will need for the shoot. I did this on word because it was the most convenient. I then needed   to see what the prospective audience thinks of some ideas I had so I created a power point with slides dedicated to asking a few questions each. I had three cars that I needed to decide from and I need to see of the actress would fit the role.
I spent hours looking at and evaluating other pop music videos on Youtube and Vimeo to help me understand the genre and the conventions that go with it. This lead to some minor changes in the shooting script and the story line. I then used my camera to take location shots of the locations I had identified on google maps and street view. This meant I was able to choose the best locations out of the ones available to me. Once this was done I began to film I had set everything up then disaster struck my original actress hurt both her legs and her recovery time meant there would be no time to shoot. I had to get another actress so I did we started shooting and ran into another problem the temperature it was draining our batteries and freezing the actress so the shots had to be done quickly often being shot only once. After the first day of shooting I had an RX8 car scene and a few parts of the song so I started editing on Imovie. This went well my newly learnt skills on the macs meant I was able to quickly sync the song the the clips I even got the door of the car to close on the beat of the drum. I continued to film adding parts from each location. I then needed to edit the car audio to make it sound more sporty and make it fit well within the song so I coped, altered some of the engine note peaks, removed some of the background noise and altered the volume to fit in the song adding to the song without being to loud. After this the filming was nearly complete I had noticed I needed a few more shots for some of the song and found that some shots were useless so I went out re filming but was unable to use the same car so I had to re shoot the whole start of the music video which made a lot of the syncing a problem. I spent around three hours just re syncing after it was finished.
I then used Idvd to put the finished music video onto a disk and I gave it a menu which contained a title and had the same genre as the music video and also had some stills from the video on it.
Since the preliminary my media skill have vastly increased, in the preliminary the syncing was out and the effects were poorly used. I had also developed better ways of shooting the video to make it easy to sync and merge. Because of the difficult macs' which work differently to every over computer on the planet it is important to be proficient in the function of a mac it was also important to practice with many of the transitions that are available in Imovie. My media production in AS was so bad it has now got legendary status at school almost the whole school has seen it. They find it funny. This is why I tried so hard to improve and create a well thought out professional music video, I believe I have improved vastly from last year and there has been many skills that I have seen develop from the preliminary to the actual music video mainly my Imovie skills and camera work.

I had to get all the clips to a similar lighting level which meant I had to alter carefully lighting levels and adjust the colours to make it look like they are all at night. The lighting was also thought about a lot when choosing where to place the powerful flood lights I used to light specific shots if they were place incorrectly the shot would have been badly lit and shadows may have been created that would have ruined the illusion of the video. When I was back lighting I had to be careful that I didn’t glare the camera but gave enough shadow to the actor to make him look suspicious. The footstep sound is digetic sound however I have altered it slightly so it fits the song better the other sounds I edited are non-diagetic because I set out to record them and change them extensively to fit the music.

I have used Blogger to show most of the work I have done it works well because anyone can see it and maybe give helpful comments.

I have used Imovie's coping software to crop down some of the shots  I also added transitions from the list (at the right of the image). I also used photo shop to create the ancillary tasks the problems I faced with this was I had never used it before. I had to learn how to use the layers and colouring software. This meant they took longer to make than expected. Once I had got the layering right I was able to create the magazine advert and digipak.