Our whole production is displayed using
multimedia platforms. We used
blogger.com as a collaborative
e-portfolio in our group throughout the planning, construction and evaluation.
Blogger.com was the central hub of or whole production, for example, during the planning stage we were required to analyse the
conventions of different music videos from our chosen
genre, as well as study the numerous techniques used to create a music video. We would then post our analyses on the blog so that we could refer back to them for inspiration and reminders on
conventions. During the construction stage of the video we used the blog to frequently update filming and editing progress as well as to schedule our next filming dates. In the evaluation stages the blog has been used to post responses to the questions.
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| Showing how we used blogger throughout our production |
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| An example of one of the music video analyses |
Our use of
blogger.com is an example of
web 2.0 because as a group we are the ones contributing to the website, and we are also closely interacting with the media.
Blogger.com enabled us to comment on each other's work and it provided a central location for our group to refer back to previous work. We distributed our media work by posting it on
YouTube and 'sharing' the link on social networking sites such as Facebook. A further example of our group's use of web 2.0 was how we used
surveymonkey.com to distribute a questionnaire for audience research. We found surveymonkey.com very useful because it is easy to use for respondents, and by simply being on the internet, opens up a much wider audience for our questionnaire.
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| Our questionnaire on surveymonkey.com |
In order to plan our pieces we use YouTube to watch music videos and analyse the main characteristics and
conventions featured in the video. We use these videos to gain a greater understanding into how videos are made and also to learn the
conventions of our chosen genre. The videos we analyse also helped to inspire us, for example, our video's concept is inspired from Coldplay's music video for 'Paradise' which features an elephant running through London and returning to the wild. We constructed an
animatic by filming off our
storyboard, which we edited using
Adobe Premier Elements 9.0.
Storyboarding proved useful because it provided a simple guideline of shots we wanted to film, and also provided a slight indication of the amount of time that a shot we would take. We used
SlideRocket to present our pitch which can be seen
here. SlideRocket was also used for my response to question one shown
here.
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| Our music video on YouTube |
When shooting we used a
Canon 550D camera which made us able to film in much better quality. However part of our video required reaction shots which were difficult to film with only one camera. To resolve this we rented out one of the school's cameras so that we could have two cameras filming at once, and also so that one person could focus on filming people's reactions. The reaction shots were filmed in
handicam and the other shots were mostly filmed using the
tripod. We used
ambient lighting and applied
continuity shooting. Another problem that we overcame was that at times the Canon camera would stop recording saying that 'filming has been stopped automatically'. We solved this by lowering the
frame rate from
25fps to 24 fps and also by deleting some unnecessary footage. After this, that message never appeared again.
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| Adobe Premier Elements 9.0 |
To edit the video we used
Adobe Premier Elements 9.0 which was helpful because one is able to zoom in and out on the
timeline in order to cut as precisely as possible for the
cuts to match the beat, and also to help us synchronise the
performance shots with the lyrics of the song.
Adobe Premier Elements was also helpful because it enabled us to enter
visual effects such as
split-screen for our
performance shots, as well as enter many different
transitions such as
cross-dissolve, dip-to-white, and others. For the final shot we used
Photoshop CS3 to create a black background with a circle cut out in the middle. The black background had to be made on a transparent background so we could see the shot, and saved as a
PNG file because
Adobe Premier wouldn't accept any other file type. The
PNG file was inserted into
Premier on top of the last shot and we then used motion-key framing in order to shrink the file, so that the last shoot showed a black circle closing in on the centre of the screen, just like the end of the Looney Tunes cartoons. However a problem did occurred because the edges of the
PNG file also shrank, so we had to use
Photoshop again to make two more plain black pictures, and put them back into the
Premier. So now the two extra black backgrounds disguised the shrinking edges of the original file. The titles were added using the
text tool.
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| Adobe Photoshop CS3 |
At the beginning of the video there is a split-screen shot of the London Eye and the big-wheel at Brighton. Both wheels are shown spinning very quickly as the titles appear. To make this happen we used the time-stretch feature in
Premier. A problem that occurred with this, and that is visible in the video, is that the two wheels rotate at different speeds when we originally intended for them to spin at an equal pace. However, we ultimately had no control over this since the London Eye turns much slower than the Brighton wheel. Our video was not meant to be special effects heavy so it didn't include many complex
transitions and
visuals, but we did use the transition called 'cross-dissolve'. We used this
transition to connote a change in time. We used this
transition for when the crocodile changed location to show that some time has passed and that he has successfully made his way around the different locations.
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| The titles shot showing the two wheels |
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