AISHA HUGHES EVALUATION

QUESTION FOUR

Q4. How did you use new media techniques in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?

We used many media techniques through out the duration of creating this media piece, from Youtube to Final cut express. Each technique had a purpose to create the most successful video, poster and Digipack possible.

Each stage from research to evaluation I used different media techniques. To start with I used YouTube to gain inspiration and knowledge on pop artist who are current. I looked at their music videos to see what was a current style that I could see than ran through out many of them. From this I realised that each music video had a very strong concept and performance. From this it was then made clear that this was something that was very important that we should incorporated into our music video if we wanted to stick to the traditional pop music videos.

We used the Internet to gain inspiration for costume and make-up ideas for our music video. I looked at the artist own websites, and browsed through their gallery for inspiration. I also gained inspiration by looking through magazines and shop windows. I wanted to have as many sources as possible to have a wide range of ideas and thoughts, thus then creating a more interesting and dynamic final piece.

I was inspired by several artist, these being Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, in every music video they have they have a very strong concept that is very visually appealing to the same target audience we have. The costumes are bright and vibrant as well as the make-up. When you watch one of their music videos its very memorable, something we wanted to make our music video.We used Barb to gain research about our target audience, this is a very useful website as without it we would not have known the key information about our audience.

Through out this whole project I have been storing my research, experiments etc. on blogger. I have used it as an online scrapbook. It has all of my development throughout this duration and is a visual way of recording what I have been doing. By it being online it is more interactive as I have been able to upload videos, wordles I have made, mind maps, collages etc. 

To gain more information about our target audience we used a website called barb, it allowed us to gain important knowledge about what channels our target market watched and now often. This was useful as if we were going to put the music video on TV channels we would then know which ones were the most viewed to then give our artist the most exposer. 

For the practical music video filming we used a digital video camera, we had to make sure that each time it was used that the colour contrast was the same as the last time to make sire there is continuity throughout the video, we white balanced it. We also used a tripod to make sure that the camera was stable and we then could produce a clear shot. Lights were used in every shot; this was because it gives a clearer, crisp image and adds a more professional look to the video. By using the lights it helped us to be able to film outside when it was dark, something that would have been a major problem if we didn’t have the lights. For the dig pack and poster we used a digital camera and took the pictures in a drama room, which gave us a good black backdrop, this making the artist the main focus.

In the editing stage of the music video I used Final cut express. To make sure that I knew what I was doing on the software I had several practices on it using different images and video clips. Such as the lip sync technique using the Tom Jones music, using images to practice key frames etc. This was very useful, as with out it the music video would have been edited at a very poor quality. I found the lip-syncing the most tiresome part of the editing as it took a lot of concentration and get the clip in the correct place, if it were slightly off then the whole video would look a much poorer quality. For the poster and digipack we used Photoshop, this was a very useful software to use as it allowed make and us to edit the picture we had taken them how we wanted them. We used the colour tool brush to change the colour of the eyes and lipsticks, as well as using the smoothing tool which allows for all imperfections to be cleared away, making the artist look more professional and as if it was a real CD and poster.


PLEASE LOOK AT MY WIX WEBSITE, THE LINK IS BELOW
WIX LINK : http://www.wix.com/aishaliz/media