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

We used new media technologies throughout this project, many we were familiar with and a number of which we had never used before. We highlight upon these in the video below.

A main difference for me was the difference in camera, the editing software and the website creation site, Wix. We also utilised a number of social networking sites available on web 2.0 such as Facebook and Twitter as well as Skype Conference calls which we used to keep in touch and brainstorm online.

Research
We relied heavily on web 2.0 in the early stages of research using YouTube and Vevo to view music videos online as well as using links of those pages to get to band websites. A particularly useful website was www.Tastekid.com a website that generates similar bands to ones you are listening to. This made our research particularly efficient as from one website we could immediately get an idea of what genre and style of band we would have to be like to suit the track we had selected.

 

Planning

As a group we stayed in contact over Facebook and Skype showing storyboards and ideas over video calls. This meant as a group we never stopped sending each other ideas making the planning stage develop ideas organically as we kept adding to each others ideas and developing even when not sat  down at a desk.

 

Construction

We utilised new technology most in the construction stage. In the productions stage of the music video we used a new type of camera, the .........
We also got to light our sets on our own for the first time, this proved difficult, but we learnt much about different forms of lighting and how to halo a character.

During editing we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, I am semi-familiar with this programme as we used it last year however being in a smaller group this year I really got a chance to experiment with editing and using different visual effects and colour grades to saturate the footage.

We also used many new technologies to create our ancillary texts.

We used a new programme called Wix to create our website, This was entirely brand new to me, it was challenging and confusing at first but as I became more accustomed to utilising the templates and flash links provided by the programme, things finally came together. Wix was generally a very useful tool it allowed us to create a visually interesting and interactive website. The use of galleries and widgets allows the creator to make something interesting without difficult html codes.

We managed to get our hands on photoshop CS5 for editing our album cover, we got to grips with it pretty fast and it allowed us to use adjustment layers over images such as 'vibrance' and 'luminosity' to give the images more colours and impact. The new version of photoshop made everything faster and easier to use such as the 'artistic' colour tool which allowed us to turn the band members and surroundings into cartoons.

Photoshop CS5 allowed us to create realistic looking album covers easily and efficiently. I used www.DaFont.com to download the fonts we used on the album as well as the ones on most of our merchandise.

Evaluation



We used lots of new media technology in our evaluation, many of which we ave already mentioned, for example we recorded and edited our response above, we used Facebook and YouTube to moniter who was consuming our products and who 'liked' them as well as using www.SurveyMonkey.com and monitering peoples opinions of our products (mentioned in Q3). Using New media allowed us to reach a vaster audience much faster than ordinary.