Shianne Brown

Question 4

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

Planning

We used the internet as a pivotal source during the planning stages of our production. Although this is not a new or upcoming technology, it still allows us to browse other artists for information, for instance our interest for indie folk music was sparked after watching and listening to Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling and Regina Spektor. On the other hand, the internet could be seen as a changing technology as there are innovative ideas emerging, such as the success of blogging, MySpace (social networking) and emailing strategies, in regards of getting email alerts to your mobile phone.

We wanted to market an artist which has a niche target audience and originality and depth in their voice. This would be a challenge to us as this particular music choice was not what we were usually accustomed to. It was difficult to find an artist, however through unsigned music websites and MySpace, we were able to find a specific artist who has the characteristics we wanted. Whilst waiting for a response from the artist Laura Marling’s agent, we used emailing to get approval; this proved to be difficult due to the demands of the music industry and was unable to get approval.

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Our attempt to get approval from Laura Marling’s agent.

Through the realm of blogging, I was able to keep up to date the progress of my media production; this was a chance to keep a diary online which represents the change in technology. Perhaps up to 5 - 10 years ago we used manual diaries, which were not particularly the easiest form of writing in addition to the time consuming aspect which was and has indeed been challenged and developed by online blogging.

It allowed me to break down the progression of the main and ancillary tasks. Blogging is a relatively new method of showing a journey or development. It is also a chance to depict your work in a professional way; it is contemporary, relevant and new to our culture of the development of new media products. I used ‘Blogger’ at first and then moved to ‘Typepad’ as it presents your work in a neat and professional way; I preferred it as I feel as though it showed my work ever more coherent.

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Construction

During the Age of Digital Revolution, music videos are able to devise depictions of surrealism and imagination, through the art of HD cameras, CGI and photo manipulation and much other advanced software. It is interesting to note media technologies are growing at a sufficient speed which encourages rivalry and competition, however this is amazing as it allows creativity to emerge and as an audience we get to get a taste of abstract and different styles. Adobe Premiere Pro was the software we used to edit our production, prestige and common

in the industry, Premiere Pro enabled us to alter colour adjustments, transitions and the speed of particular clips.

High Angle Shot.

During this particular scene we altered the colour adjustments slightly, (although the sun was of assistance) it engendered a sense of surrealism and character to our production, we changed the contrast and the lighting in order to give our music video start quality, as the bright light often represents stardom. In addition, following

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Goodwin’s theory, I was able to use a significant amount of close ups of the artist which develop a visual style, which consequently is used throughout the production, as well as in my ancillary texts. To a degree, Adobe Premiere Pro, allowed us to form a communication with the audience via close shots which progressively constructs a certain image of the artist. Furthermore, according to Carol Vernallis’ ‘Experiencing Music Video’, this type of editing is referred to ‘MTV style editing’, this places emphasis on ‘quick cutting’ and ‘editing on the beat’. This is turn concentrates on genre

Two different shots emerged into one to bring an illusion of peace and sanctuary for artist; which sends out the same message of peace to the viewer. This was a way of developing the convention of the folk/indie genre as there is not a huge emphasis on

the combination of two shots, it emerges two thematic depictions which we have expressed in earlier footage, peace and escapism.

As we were using Adobe Premiere Pro we found a transparency tool which allowed two clips to merge into one, one being the background whilst the other was most prominent. And so, this particular shot constructed an image of heading away, as the sea in the background epitomises freedom, escapism and the magnitude of her happiness. It is smooth and subtle

which gave the moving image, peace as it was not a sharp edit which is often used within the pop genre, yet we followed the particular genre of indie/folk music. Therefore, through the development of editing software, producers now have the ability to manipulate the moving image to create an ideology that they want their audience to see. This is a decision that producers often make in the planning stages of their production. The construction of this scene is a depiction of the media technology used within the real industry. In Nelly Furtado’s ‘All Good Things Come to an End’, the producers have used the transparency tool to give a smooth and calm atmosphere to the audience. This tool also gives an escapism and surreal ideology incorporated in it, as it combines the sublime (sea) and normality (artist walking away).

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Similar to Nelly Furtado, we wanted to use the forage (long shot) of the sea, combined with the appearance of the star; however as a form of developing our own ideas we have used this shot as a significant moment in our work as Nelly Furtado frequently uses it in her work, we did not want to over use it as it would’ve made the shot less effective.

Whilst filming we used a HD camera recorder which enhanced the quality of the filming to construe our naturalistic concept. The majority of our scenes are open scene which were significant as the sun had a great impact on the quality and the naturalism we wanted to illustrate. The invention of the camera-recorder has allowed a generation of D.I.Y productions, whereby we no longer have to use extremely expensive equipment in order to make a media productions.

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Planning

Additionally, we created an animatic which is a storyboard with motion; this is used a lot with the moving image industry, with the focus being on planning as it gives distributors and buyers of the movie a chance to see what the final product will be like. This also is a new media technology which is fairly recent with one of the first music video’s creating this before actually shooting it was The Gorillaz.

Using Windows Movie Maker, we were able to develop our animatic. This enabled us to use music and use transitions which would be a part of our real product.

Evaluation

In order to get feedback we transferred our work from an Apple Mac laptop which we used to edit onto a hard drive. From the hard drive we then transferred our music video onto our laptop. There were some complications as it did not work and so we had to convert the video into a QuickTime Player format. This gave us the opportunity to show our work to different audiences to gain diverse answers and feedback. In addition, to record the audience feedback we used several methods, firstly we wrote the questions for our questionnaire, thus manual answers were produced, however some of the questions had numeric values so I transferred them onto Microsoft Excel, inputted the data and then converted it into charts; bar and pie charts to be specific. This would give a more professional and easy to read depiction of our results from an audience.