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

New media technologies were used during the whole project. This helped us to communicate with each other and to create our final products. It was especially important for our group during the construction, as green screen and after effects were used prominently for our music video.

Research and Planning


Facebook:
We made a Facebook group with all three of us in it, it proved to be very useful over the course of our project, as it let us organise group meetings as well as share ideas with each other

Eddie sharing an idea with us

YouTube

We could watch music videos that inspired our ideas

YouTube proved to be a very valuable resource for us during the research and planning stage. We could always use it to search for music videos to inspire us. We could also link videos to each other as a means of showing each other what we had in mind for the music video. YouTube was especially helpful during the making of our steal-o, since it let us easily find music videos for it, which we could download and then edit.



Mobile Phones

We were able to benefit from technological convergence by using our phones. This was helpful as it let us stay in contact on the go, both with our group and with actors. We could use text messages, WhatsApp and Facebook on our mobile phones. It also helped when it came to managing our social media pages such as Instagram, which cannot be accessed on a computer.

Construction:

Cameras

During the shoots, we used the school's Canon 5D Mark II and Eddie's Canon 600D camera. Both cameras shot footage in HD, ensuring we could get good footage. Furthermore, we could uses both cameras at the same time to film the same scene from different angles, which greatly increased our efficiency.

The Lighting desk

Leapfrog Lighting Desk

This year, we got access to the Leapfrog lighting desk. This allowed us to use the studio's lights, which helped a lot when it came to lighting our set. We could have our lighting set up literally at the touch of a button, speeding up the preparation process for shoots a lot.




Cyclorama

The school studio had a both a white and a green cyclorama, which we were able to use in our music video. This in combination with the Arri floor lights and  blacked blinds on the windows helped us make sure that the set was properly lit.

Construction -Post Production:

Premiere Pro

New media technologies were vital in the editing of our video, since it heavily relied on the Adobe software Premiere Pro and After Effects. Premiere pro was used to edit all of our footage into a timeline, once this was done we then edited the shots one by one in After Effects and replaced the old unedited shots. Another use Premiere Pro had was that it let us do an audio effect in which it made the music sound tinny, to show that it was coming from the main character's headphones at the start, we then key framed it so that the sound effect went away when she put the headphones on.



After Effects

After Effects also played a huge role in the editing of our video. It was what enabled us to change the backgrounds of each shot, and without it our footage would have been useless. We also used After Effects to grade the video by using 'Color Finesse'. Eddie had experience with the software prior to our project, so he was able to help Mario and myself learn how to use it. One way he did this is that he taught me how to do frame by frame masking, for example, on the champagne glass in one of the shots. This was useful as it meant that work on After Effects wasn't entirely reliant on Eddie being there and let us do some of the work as well.

Before After Effects editing

After everything was edited

Evaluation:

Blogger

Blogger has been a really important part of the project, since it is what I used to express the work that I have done and write about the processes I went through throughout the project. The ability to embed different elements into the post, such as images, gif files, videos and also prezis. All of these came together to make my work a lot more visual and interactive, this was especially useful in my evaluation posts. However, Blogger did have some drawbacks, it was very difficult to format my posts at times, sometimes images would move around very awkwardly when inserted into posts, making it hard to position them where I wanted them to go.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, new media technologies were very useful in every stage of the project. Although learning how to use after effects was time consuming, and took a lot of effort, I think this paid off since it left us with an amazing video as the final product.