Question 4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Research and Planning
During our whole process of research and planning, construct and evaluation we used a facebook group chat to communicate with each other and share ideas. This had many advantages as we could contact each other from anywhere at anytime with ease and no problems of us not being able to contact one and other, another big advantage to using facebook group chatting is that it allowed us to share links to webpages, work and other information that the others within the group could use, find useful or need to access. This also allowed us to socialise which on the surface seems unproductive however it allowed is to get to know each other better learning each others strengths and weaknesses meaning we would help each other further than we would if we didn't know each other like we did at the start of this process. However this could also sometimes be a disadvantage with us getting side tracked and distracted causing us to sometimes not get all the work done that we would have liked too. The second and only other disadvantage that came about from us using this social media was that it is quiet hard to convey points and have discussions as compared to in person it is rather hard, however over all it was a great advantage to use while we were producing our work. To get proof of our discussions into the blog we used screen capture to take screen shots of our conversation, this made it rather awkward to get it into my blog however it would have been the same for any other messaging service so it was compatible however it could have been easier.
Pintrest was very useful for us to find many images related to key words to do with out genre and band allowing us to research very easily into costumes and themes for our website, video and digipak. It is very easy to use with just adding any picture to your pin board and presenting it very well making it very well presented and easily understandable to everyone. One disadvantage is that text couldnt be added to the pin board itself so you would have to do that outside of it. The compatibility with the blog was brilliant as you could share it to the blog and have a small pin board appear in the post of your choice, this allowed for easy access to your pin board from the blog but also allowed you to see the it without even leaving the blog.
I only used a poll once during in my blog however I still believe it to be a very useful tool to collect data during the research especially about my target audience, what it does very well is allows me to gather large amounts of data from a a large amount of people with varied interests and present it in a very easily understandable and professional way. One disadvantage to the poll is that it takes a large amount of time to collect accurate data as not everyone can fill out the poll at the same time so it was a waiting game to when I would receive enough data for my readings to be conclusive. Also there is nothing stoping people lying on the poll so the data could be inaccurate in that aspect however that is very unlikely, similar the facebook group chat to get the poll results from the only software I used into the blog I need to screen shot however I now know of some other pool systems that allow integration with blogger similar to the pintrest integration.
Prezi was one of the most integral pieces of online software I used whilst doing both research and planing as well as my evaluations. It is a great way to present information that would you would put in a powerpoint as it is very similar however it adds animation and many more design options making it extremely customisable allowing me to be very creative even when presenting very dull information. Another big advantage to Prezi is that it is all online and can be accessed anywhere by yourself and anyone you share it with allowing multiple people to work on the same presentation and collect their ideas together to make the most of all of the peoples abilities, this was a great asset to the group while we all contributed our own parts to big projects as well as help each other complete there parts if someone was unable to. This made collaboration much easier than it would have been without access to each others work. I was able to integrate this into my blog with ease as it has a share function which allows me to ember it within my blog meaning people can view it without having to go to the actually prezi website however kept my work safe with no editing access available from this embed version.
Twitter I only used to gather some feedback from Jake Wynne a professional music video editor and producer. This is the main advantage of Twitter as a site as it allows everyone to connect together and share products and feedback. To integrate this into my blog I had to use the grab tool on the mac by selecting what I wanted to screen shot and then uploading it to my blog, so I was a tedious process but allows me to display my progress very well through the feed back I have received from Jake off Twitter.
Music Video
We used a cannon video camera to shoot our music video, this camera was very good quality being able to shoot in 1080p HD allowing our video to be high quality, as well as allowing us to freeze frame to grab photos if we thought they would be good for our webpage or digipak. The portability of the camera and tripod was excellent as it allowed us to take it with us out to the stables and it was to big to carry around, this allowed us to film in more further out locations which were harder to get to and to film our narrative part of our video. One small disadvantage is that we could only get access to two 8gb sd cards meaning that we were limited to the amount of footage we could film meaning that we had to film over somethings to get enough good footage for our video however this wasn't a massive problem but could have caused us more trouble. All the footage off the sd card was logged and transfered onto the video editing software final cut which was what we used to edit the footage we had filmed and music we had, this software was very smooth and easy to use when we didn't have problems with it. The multi-timeline editing meant I could view all the footage while editing it together so I could experiment with ease however whilst editing our footage we came across a large problem in which any edit we made to the video where it be a cut or change in opacity it made it so the whole file would need rendering so we could preview what we had done so a lot of the editing was done blind meaning that we edited without being able to preview it and then changing anything we had gotten wrong afterwords, this was a large inconvenience to our editing however with perseverance we managed to push through this problem and with much longer spent on editing that imagined we got a final product created. Despite the problems with the editing it came out very well especially when e adding in the colour correction in which we stripped the video of all colour and leaking the red back through, this was very easy using the effects board in final cut which after some research I realise was much simpler than any other of the type. We lowered the saturation to remove all colour and then used the chroma edit to leak the red back through, we had a little trouble with this because of the lighting in some shots and also the conditions in which we filmed outside making peoples faces red and letting that leak through too. Once rendered and Exported it was uploaded to Vimeo and then embedded into the blog allowing people to view and comment on the video from the blog without having to go to Vimeo itself.
Digipak
Using the cannon stills camera we were able to take incredibly high quality photos in all lighting conditions allowing us to take photos throughout the whole day filming. The portability just like the video camera was a big factor allowing photos in weird and hard to reach locations to be easily accessible. Once the photos were put onto the Mac we used photo shop to edit then in the same way in which we edited the video by removing the colour and adding in the red however it was much easier in photoshop due to the fact they are still pictures and we could very precisely draw around the actors to add in the red and also add in other effects such as the wooden back grounds behind them. Taking the photo and editing them to look like positives and negatives of a film reel allowed us to make our digipak look very authentic by placing them over templates we found online before placing them on our digipak. We used the these photos by uploading them to the blog which was very simple to integrate them into a post but we also uploaded them to Wix in which we used them to create the website where we had merchandise and all of the behind the scenes photos.
Website
Wix was a very simple program to use as we could add all our own photos to it to make it seem very authentic before we added logos and flavour text very easily through the simple drag and drop system. We then added all the images from our digipak meaning that our website and digipak matched perfectly without any differences what so ever, we had multiple people from the group work together on the webpage allowing each other to add their own personal touch to the band members page about themselves adding flavour stories that would be similar to what normal bands would have on their websites. This was a rather hard thing to integrate into the blog as we could not get the website to appear on the blog making it very difficult to display easily so we had to just link out website so whoever was viewing the blog would have to leave the blog to view it which wasnt what we wanted however it was the best that could be done with the resources we had.


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