Media Technologies in the research, planning, construction stages.

I have had to use a range of different technologies throughout the course of this project. from the cameras and equipment that I used to create the film, to the editing software I used to put the video and the ancillaries together.


The Video

One  of the most important pieces of technology that I used in this project was the camera that I used to film my video. it did not have a great amount of features and settings for me to work with so the main technique that I had to focus on was getting interesting angles and finding a way to move the camera along for more interesting moving shots. One way that I achieved this was with my variable height tripod which I used to the best of my ability to attempt more interesting shots.

One problem that I faced is that I had planned out a few moving shots which were quite key to the video. I realised later though that I didn't have access to a dolly and obviously lacked the budget to set up a track or use an expensive Steadicam. I got around this limitation by rigging the camera and it's tripod to a supermarket trolley and using that the get the shots. This did then mean that I could only film these moving shots inside the supermarket as the outdoor ones proved too shaky to use.

the second most important piece of technology that I used was the editing software (Adobe Premiere Pro) that I used to cut up, shorten, and alter all of my footage. I did not use a great amount of effects or special editing techniques in my A2 piece as the genre did not permit it. One thing that I both came up with and was able to achieve in post production was increasing the speed of some of my clips. Watching the footage through, it was clear that some of the moving shots were not up to the pace of the song and of the rest of the video. to fix this, I decided to double the speed of the clips rather than re-shoot them. this not only fit in well with the music, but created an interesting style that I later built on by changing some of the editing on other bits of footage.

The Ancillaries

I took the photographs for my ancillary tasks with the same camera that I used for my video. being primarily a photography camera I had a few more options than when I took the video, I experimented with higher and lower depths of field but decided not to use that technique in the end as it did not fit with the genre. I did though lower the ISO on the camera to get a darker image, that's how I was able to capture the deep colours in my poster shot.

I needed the use of another Adobe program to help edit my Ancillary pictures as well as to add the text and logos. I had planned to complete everything in this one program but as I started to create the back and inside faces of the CD case (Digipak), I started to fill in elements using basic Microsoft Paint. A large amount was still done in Photoshop, I simply created the base of each of the faces, added some text and then shipped it over to Photoshop.

Research, Planning and Evaluation

the first piece of media technology was what you are reading right now. This is a simple but effective website which allows me to format text and images as a basic word processor would do, following this though, it allows me to publicly display what I've written up so that it can be seen by anyone.

The second piece of online media technology is a website called Prezi. in the same way that Blogger is an online counterpart for Word, Prezi is an online counterpart for PowerPoint, allowing me to create sideshows that combine text and images though. the big difference is that Prezi allows you many different ways of presenting and transitioning the slides. it also allows me to display these slides publicly as with Blogger.