Monday, 12 March 2012

Evaluation 4!

"How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?"


I used new media technologies throughout the whole process of our video making. Primarily for research. I found new media technologies incredibly helpful because the information needed was literally there with just a click and the internet. We didn't need to go searching around numerous libraries trying to find the information we required on music from the past and the generic conventions that were vital to make a particular genre.

The research I did, not only included basic knowledge, but also the very detailed specific information I needed to help with creating or re-creating a certain look for our project. One example is the work of Adele. We had to really investigate the patter her work follows and the links from one piece of work to another. None of this would be anywhere near as accessible if we didn't have the technology we have now.




Adding to the computers and internet the different softwear we have now is so helpful and trying to make the videos, as we have done would be near enough impossible. It would take considerably longer than it took us to get the effects and accuracy when cutting the shots and placing them together. The particular softwear we used is Adobe Premiere Pro. This combined with the computers is incredible. It's easy enough to have grand ideas, but the new media technology is 100% nescassary for us to make the ideas real.

The most important part is the camera. Without the developed cameras we have now, it would be almost impossible to get the footage like we have. Now that such small, handheld cameras are available we can not only get shots in different places but in different angles too. If we had old style cameras that weren't as far on it would be so much harder to get the clear image that we've achieved in these shots. The quality would be really poor.

We also used a lot of new media technology when photoshopping the photographs. We completely transformed the images to make them less amature amd more like the work of a professional music artist trying to sell their work. This was a vital step in acheiving the look we have wanted for our digipak.We used another piece of softwear for this stage, again it was Adobe but this time we used Adobe Photoshop.

Here is the process we went through editing one of the photographs taken of Chloe as I have mentioned previously in my blog:

To start, select the image you want and select the tab at the top of the page, labelled 'layers' and in this list there's an option to put a black and white layer over the top, select that. This is how the image looks after this first step. There are many different options in this section, and lots of different effects you can put on with the layer tab.



This image shows the process of adding a neon glow to the image, we found this while experimenting with all of the effects. To start with we selected 'Filter', then 'Artistic' and then 'Neon Glow'. At this point the picture opens in a new window and the black and white filter dissapears. In this case, the photo went back to it's original appearance until we had selected the effect we wanted. This time that was 'Neon Glow'



This is how the image looks after the effect has been added. On the right side of the screen there are some controls so that we can decide how much we want the picture to glow and how strong it is. We can decide what colour we want the glow to be and how clear the picture is. We pretty much left it as it was with the ready set amounts. We did experiment but this seemed to be enough.



After the effect was added this is the finished product. We are going to edit parts of it to make it look more like the front cover of a CD.


This is the next stage, for starters we cut the image down to the size of the Album cover. This also solved another little problem we had; when we put the glow onto the picture it made Chloe's arm/sleeve look a little strange, so when we trimmed the image it cut that problem off. We still need to add little bits to the image to make it like a front cover; such as the album title, artist name etc.

Here are the results of our experimenting with the title and artist name etc. We have tried two different names, both of which are in different fonts. One is 'Treasure' and the other is 'Outback'. We also put another layer over and made the image a bit more sepia than just plain black and white.

Finally, we used new media technology very much to get feedback on all of our work. Our video, poster and digipak. We used multiple websites and social networking sites, such as; Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. To post our work and get feedback from the viewers.



The feedback we got was mainly positive. The only negative comment we received was about the overacting of our main performer. One quote was "from the acting, you expect a big Celine Dion ballad to come out, but the song is really soft. They don't match" - this point is fair, it's true and we know about it. So we know to look out for all of these aspects in future projects. Here are some screengrabs of our feedback:



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