So now we have come to the end of my project.
From researching genres of music videos, planning for my own, filming, editing to evaluating my products.
It has been an incredibly fun year where I feel like I've learnt so much about the media industry, how planning, production and editing is actually like, and where as a year ago I had little to no experience with any of these skills, over this project I have learnt and develop an enormous range of skills in the media industry that will help me in future projects I wish to do.
Here's something as a special farewell, all of the bloopers and outtakes we filmed:
(Here I have done a Point Point Presentation to explore this question.
Click on the image below and scroll down from there for easy access)
(Here is the same content written out in the regular blog format for the people who prefer this presentation)
Research
While researching for my music video and ancillary tasks I used several formats and media technologies.
I used Google Chrome predominantly to search for conventions of types of genres of songs and for Digi-pack and magazine information.
But unlike in AS I made sure to gather my information from an array of sources including websites like wikipedia and Prezi; and different formats like video presentations experts in the field have created. This enormous variety of research has allowed me to develop my skills thanks to such easy access.
And later I also used websites like Survey Monkey and Social Media to try and find out what people's preferences and opinions where which then informed my work.
Planning
This was similar to the research I did in the use of technologies, predominantly using my desktop to plan and record developments I made.
Blogger was an enormous help to me as it allowed me to keep a structure to my work and helped me through my journey. I've been able to look back at my work chronologically and have everything in an order that makes it easy to find all the work I've done.
I've managed to optimize this technology far better than I did last year, developing skills to use the technology to structure my work better and make it more accessible with functions like Theme, Background, Heading, Labels, Advance Layout and other key settings.
Filming (Construction)
When filming started it also meant that I would have to start familiarizing myself with new types of media technologies. (Eg: A tripod, dolly, green screen and a wide variety of cameras from an extremely high quality Funjifilm Finepix S4700 Bridge DSLR camera, to film the actual music video and my own I Phone 5s, that I personally used to film all of the behind the scenes footage I recorded and put on my vlog for you to see)
Last year at AS I had to use some (but not all) of these equipment, but I wasn't particularly experienced in the skills needed to professionally use them.
Editing (Construction)
When editing we used Final Cut Pro, and during the editing stage we added many additional effects to the video from text, sound effect to visual effects.
In AS we had very little experience dealing with editing technologies which could be seen in last year's simplicity.
But this year I feel the video is proof of our development of our skill in using the software as is evident in all the additions we've made to enhance the quality of the video:
(I have already briefly discussed the editing changes that were made but here's a more in depth look)
Victorian colour scheme was adjusted from the 'Combat' filter, and also had 'Cinematic bars' before the song begins to add mood, and looped 'industrial sound effects' to further improve the sense of atmosphere.
We also added 'Sepia' colour adjustments to the 1930's along with a gunshot effect and muzzle flash.
In the 1950's we increased the saturation.
For the green screen section we simply ran it threw the editing software removing all the screen on camera and replacing it with white.
And finally the Present Day section had a 'UK Emergency Services Police Serine' with a 'Spaceship' audio distortion.
All of this is vastly superior to last year's work where all I had was a single gun sound effect and background music.
Here is an in depth video about the process and decisions we made during editing and a few behind the scenes work in editing our music video.
Ancillary Tasks (Construction)
To make my magazine advert and digi-pack I used photoshop.
I took what I thought to be the most iconic and interesting stills of the video and arranged them into smaller series of episodes, each corner or panel dedicated to a certain time period with the 1890's being the main focus as it is the opening segment and the one we spend the most time on, so I made it's imagery and colour scheme with the brick patterns a recurring design element for both of them.
This again was something very different from what I was required to do last year and being presented with this new technology I had to learn and develop my skill in.
Evaluating
For my final stage, Evaluation, I wanted to use a wide variety of technologies and formats.
This year i used an enormous array of media from regular blog posts discussing and evaluating, videos, gifs and images, Podcast videos and evaluation videos (Filmed on my I Phone 5S or Fujifilm Camera), Survey Monkey surveys, Pixton cartoons to illustrate my feedback, Microsoft Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 (64 Bit), Bubbl.us and several others.
This is in stark contrast to last year where I only ever used mundane blog posts with enormous paragraphs without any pictures, videos or anything remotely interactive. But now I've been able to develop my use of multiple forms and this has allowed me to effectively use the technology available to me.
