Evaluation of video

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

When researching into our task, we used the popular video website 'youtube' to look at existing music videos. Youtube displays endless varieties of videos covering multiple genres. This was useful in gaining ideas of styles and also looking at the music video of our song. We have provided a link on the blog to youtube, showing the video of our chosen song. When looking into posters and CD covers we used google images and google web search which provided us with some of the best CD covers of all times. We studied what was successful in these covers and applied the ideas to our own cover.

In order to film our project we had to use a hand held camcorder. As it was a small project run through college, the equipment was low cost and easy to use, however by using it correctly and creatively we were able to achieve the best results. We sometimes came across problems, such as running out of battery however, due to the simplicity of the equipment and our groups knowledge, we easily overcame these problems.

To log and capture the footage we shot we used the program Final Cut Pro (FCP) on the Apple Mac computers. FCP is quite a complex application to use, however as all of our group learned how to use it last year, we had no problems in editing our video. Firstly we had to capture all the individual shots off the camera and transfer them into the timeline. This was quite a time consuming process especially when we started cutting down the clips as we wanted them to change exactly to the beat. To cut the clips we used the razor blade tool which allowed us to be very specific with which frames we got rid of. We explored the various possibilities FCP provides and used the split screen option and also 'distortion' and 'glow' effects the vary the lighting, exposure and clarity of the shots.

For the construction of our CD cover and poster we used Photoshop. I found using Photoshop slightly more difficult than using FCP, although our overall product does not reflect this. For the poster, we had to grab a screenshot from our video using the 'Preview' application, we then transferred this to Photoshop and used it for the background. We changed the amount of focus on the picture so it look slightly blurred and applied a black and white gradient to it.

The blog has been a great way for us to record and analysis our progress and work. It has allowed us to take screen shots from our videos to display on the blog and stream videos as well. Teachers were able to look at the blog at any time and give us feedback or see if we were keeping to the deadline. Electronic recording is an easier and more simple way of logging work and is a perfect example of how media technologies has helped in the planning, construction and evaluation of our project.