Josh Breeze G324 Music Promotional Package

Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The majority of the media technology used within the research and planning stages of the task was based around the online program Blogger. Using Blogger was incredibly useful, as it meant that all of my personal research was available to me at instantly and accessible in any location as it was all saved online. This meant for example that if I needed a piece of work such as a shot list, it could easier be accessed by logging on to blogger at home. In addition to this, it made posting multimedia content a lot more efficient, as I could easily integrate video, pictures, graphs and text. However, a weakness of Blogger is the lack of ability to back up any work which is saved on it - this means that everything I had researched was at risk of being lost if the system was to fail. Also on multiple occasions Blogger was very prone to crashing meaning that the program had to be refreshed which was very inconvenient.

In addition to this, I used websites such as Slide Share in order to research the various theories and ideas which I would need to use in my work, such as the Andrew Goodwin's theory about the seven features which all music videos contain. When researching the history of music video, I primarily used Wikipedia, as this contained a large amount of useful information about which videos were the most popular over time and general information about different artist and bands. In addition to this, I was able to use YouTube to watch music videos over time so I could see how various generic conventions have been used within them. Overall, using various websites within the research and planning stage of the production of my music video helped me to create ideas about what to include in our own music video when we made it.

During the research and planning stage, we were required to make a lip-syncing video, in order to gain some practical work on using the filming and editing equipment. We used new media technology in the editing stage of this video, using iMovie in order to piece the shots together. We found when creating our lip syncing practice within iMovie was quite easy to use and also worked well in creating the final product. This was a useful task as it showed us the pros and cons of using iMovie, and led us to make the decision to use iMovie as the editing software for our final music video. In terms of my promotional package, I mostly used a mixture of Word and PowerPoint, which are both two unusual software’s to use to create an effective promotional package consisting of the magazine advert and Digipak for our music video. I had some experience with Adobe Photoshop, but I found that overall Word worked well for me and I used it effectively to create both the magazine advert and also the Digipak. New media technology was incredibly important in both researching and planning all of my products as it allowed me to find out a huge amount of new information, and to practise and perfect the skills which I began to develop during the final stages of the promotional package.

Construction - During the construction stage of both our music video and the promotional package, I used a number of both new technologies, and technologies which I already had some experience with. For the music video, the most important piece of technology which we used was the camera, which unconventionally we chose to use an iPhone 6s for the whole filming of the video. The camera itself had excellent portability and had a very well equipped interface and resolution for such as small device., which made it easy to create a strong depth of field within certain shots of our video.

As a lot of our video was filmed in the during day time hours, having DSLR camera was necessary for our music video as the iPhone 6s was able to get 4K quality or what we used which was 1080p 60fps.
However, the camera also had some weaknesses which slightly hindered the production of our video, as the battery life was fairly weak with a maximum capacity of around 60 minutes in the resolution we used. This meant that we had to vastly limit the length of time which we could shoot for in a single day, although the limited battery life did help us as it forced us to be more efficient when choosing what material to shoot. In addition to this, the camera filmed onto an internal memory inside the phone, meaning that when it came to editing it toke no more than 2 minutes to transfer the clips from the apple device to the iMac.

Another important piece of hardware used for the construction stage of our music video was the iMac which we used as a workstation for our editing. This computer was chosen because of its larger screen than most computers have (27 inches) and also it was very quick and efficient when it came to editing in iMovie. This made it perfect for running both iMovie and other software’s we needed to run at the same time. We chose to solely use iMovie as we both had a lot of experience using the editing software and also was very efficient in the tasks that we needed to do on the software. Specific features which we used from the software include iMovie's precision editor in order to assist with our lip syncing and also the stabilising tool to help make all of our clips look stable. It was important that we used a Mac to edit our footage on, as using a Windows PC would severely hinder the quality of editing software which we had available to us.

We used YouTube heavily during the construction aspect of the music video, as it allowed us to upload parts of our video which we could send to members of our target audience to immediately gain feedback. This was incredibly useful as it meant we could make quick changes to the video and without having a platform like YouTube then we would have to wait long periods of time for our target audience to watch our video on the iMac, which is very time consuming. In addition to the construction of the music video, I also used a variety of hardware and software in the construction of my Digipak and magazine advert. We actually used an iPhone 6s in order to take the pictures for our products.

This worked well as it was easy to use and also very portable meaning that we could get shots within tight spaces that are larger DSLR camera which wouldn’t be able to do. We edited the images using Microsoft Word, an unconventional program that worked for our needed well.
It was good to use a program like this as it allowed us to produce our products with a surprising amount of ease and was able to access the products in many different locations such as at home, as the program is very commonly used. Overall, I believe that we used new media technologies relatively well during the construction process of our music video, although our one shortcoming was that we didn't experiment enough with the equipment and some of the software we used, which could have allowed us to produce an even more imaginative and memorable music video and promotional products.

Evaluation-
When putting together my evaluation, I used a variety of multimedia technologies to present my conclusion in an exciting and invigorating way. Similar to the research and planning stage, I used Blogger in order to present my findings using multimedia, for example in this post, where I have been able to seamlessly integrate text and images to back up my points. Using Blogger also means that I have been able to edit my evaluation as many times as necessary, whereas if I had been

evaluating the task on paper, I would have had to continually redraft until I had a document which I was happy with the standard of. Another media technology which I used within my evaluation is Emaze and Prezi, which are online presentation creation software. It allowed me to answer questions in a much more imaginative way. In addition to this, many find Prezi and Emaze to be a more engaging way of displaying information than just pure text, as like Blogger it has capabilities for the user to embed a wide range of multimedia. To conclude, I believe that I used new media technologies to their full extent during the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages of producing my product.