Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
In order to attain the various outcomes we had, a lot of exploration and development was carried out to substantiate our thoughts for the initial presentation. In general, we had imagined some great pitches of how our products would eventually look. For the body of our investigation we made use of the Internet to search on Youtube for various to tracks and development of our characters.

We also took a few samples album covers from Google to assemble a constructive and relevant mood board in order for us develop our ideas as we moved towards the initial shooting process. 

We had thoroughly looked over the lyrics of our track to sketch out our scenes so we would ascertain lyrical/visual correlation. On the other hand, we also had to make sure the set we picked reflected the style of our project so sites like Microsoft maps came very much in handy. One of the main reaction comments from our peers was to incorporate more variety of shots of the lead singer (Adam Johnson) and to fix the inconsistent timing of the drummer and guitarist. We eventually managed to get round to curing the timing of our instrumentalists via the Final Cut Pro crosscut feature with the guide of our technician/Director (Michael Burrin).We also went back into the archive of shots we had from shooting and added more shots of Adam from different angles and perspectives. To prevent errors like the ones stated above from occurring I think we should have tried to trial with the editing windows in advance so we don't need to rely on feedback support at so many stages. The foremost inspiration for our concepts was previous videos and artists that motivated us. An example is ‘Low Happening’ done by preceding A2 students. We took into close consideration how they edited the order while exploring the lighting and choreography used in each scene. In the end we decided to go in a different direction by not having a narrative and using a performance style for shooting. We also used a program called MPEG Streamclip to convert our edited video from DV file to MP4 so we can upload them to the blogger website. This montage of images animatic production of our video was created on the imovieHD program, this Mac program was much easier to use and access than Finalcut pro, which would have been a waste of time if we tried to do something simple with a complicated system. However, we didn't foresee us running out of scenes to fill up the songs duration. This was due to our us not filming a narrative due to time constraints, we eventually duplicated some good shots from our archive and were able integrate them into the video. Determining how much action should be filmed within a second was also quite a dilemma for us but we used the sketches we had from our storyboard and had a great sequence for the entire duration of the video. We were very worn out after attempting to perfect the color overlay in each shot so we ended up dragging the effect over the entire project and saving it as one file, this took less time and saved a lot of man hours from us as a team. Energizing our technical pre-production resources such as the shot list and time line would definitely stop us from suffering deficient footage with our final cut. Previous to the post-production phase, we decided to experiment with the available filters using tutorials from the Finalcutking Youtube page. We did this to ensure that we could fix the effect overlay in case we encountered any inconsistencies whilst editing. By and large I trust our project has turned out to be flourishing piece of work despite the slight difficulties we had during its occurrence.