Question 3- How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages

Construction

We used brand new state of the art camera's to film our work.

                

We saved our work on memory cards and hi-tec  hard drives, which was really efficient as it allowed us to gain access to our work quickly.

Research, Planning and evaluation

                                                

                    

I used the internet as a resource for research purposes and to collect screen shots. Such websites include the likes of google where in which I used it to find images of several album covers and advertisement's in order to establish conventions of adverts and digipaks and to gain inspiration. 

I used vimeo to collect screen shots from my video to use in my a number of my blog entries, and to look at past video's for ideas and for analysis. 

In addition to this I also used youtube, in the research stages to look for a song to do our video to and to gain inspiration. I also used it to collect screen shots to use in a number of my blog entries.

Construction of video

We constructed our video using final cut pro using a range of techniques and effects in order to generate our final product. 

This image is a screen shot from one of the shots in our video, originally this had a normal green screen background behind the artist. We opted to change the colour in order to add an element of fun to tie in to the fun vibrant fresh sound of the song. We also used bright colours as we felt they would be very striking and eye catching and would appeal to our target audience of indie pop teens.  We originally found it quite difficult to gage the right level of darkness without the image of the artist becoming distorted and so had to be patient in order to get the correct balance. We used the "chroma keyer" tool to get the right level of brightness and saturation for the green screen shots. We then selected the "colour picker" tool to change the background to a variety of colours, we did this by adding additional filters and changed the colour of these filters. We then added transisitions by selecting the too bar, going into tools and effects then selecting video transition between each colour to create a moving background in order to keep the video interesting and fun.

We toyed around with the brightness and contrast of this clip to increase the quality of the shot as the original clip was quite dark. We added an effect of "dazzle" to the lips. We did this by selecting effects and adding a video filter. We chose to have sweets on the lips because it added a girly and teen feel to it, which again added to the element of fun we tried to create for not only our video but the artist in general. 

Construction of ancillary texts

 I created my digipak in photoshop, to begin with I selected a two pannel template.  I then imported my chosen image and resized it and dragged it to the front pannel. Following this, I used the "magnetic lassoo" tool in order to cut out the silouhette of the artist, at first I attempted to use the magnetic wand, however I found it much more difficult to get an accurate cut out of the artist and so stuck to using the magnetic lassoo tool.  To change the colour of the background from white to pink I selected the "paint bucket" tool. I created the shapes of butterflies and musical notes by selecting the "custom shape" tool.  I then manipulated these shapes by selecting "colour picker" and changing the colours. To add text I selected the "text" tool in the option bar and selected chalk duster, I then added an effect to the text by going to styles and effects. After this I selected "layer styles" in the drop down menu and chose "wow plastic" for the effect.

For the inside left panel I used the elipse tool to create a circle, which acts as the place where the c.d would potentially go, following the same method as explained above to create shapes on both the inside right and inside left panel.

I created my advert in photoshop using the same methods in terms of tools as I did for my digipak. I took a screen shotted image of my artists digipak and incorporated it on my avertisement. 

This is my animatic story board, containing still images of our original ideas created in final cut pro.