Question 4

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

Created with Padlet
 
Created with Padlet  

Screencast showing aspects of editing that went into creating our final music video:

    Screencast showing aspects of editing that went into creating our final ancillaries:

 
We used iMovie to edit the production again this year because it was easier to edit straight away rather than learn a completely new program. Since using iMovie last year there have been significant updates and lots of new professional features have been added such as the ability to choose how long overlay shots fade in and out for and the opacity settings have been refined so that the shots blend better together now. We took a different approach to editing this year by putting the whole song onto the project first, along with a video that was the same length of the song and then cut the one shot on the beat and then replaced all the cut sections. This made it easier to move shots around because you could tell how long they needed to be when selecting them- this made for greater accuracy with lip syncing which overall made the production more effective. One problem with iMovie is that it doesn’t have all of the professional tools that other editors like Premiere Pro have, such a selecting singular colours, objects and a timeline with multiple streams of video and audio. We have developed our editing skills this year even though we used the same program, because we developed faster, more accurate and efficient ways of organising the shots on the timeline that allowed us to edit much faster. Because we were able to edit our production so quickly we were able to act on audience and teacher feedback quicker and we had more time for improvements. This meant that we had time to improve the production twice so there are three cuts overall.

A MacBook Pro was used to edit the production, which was a benefit because we were able to edit outside of lesson and school time. Using a Mac made our group more productive because Mac OS X is much easier to use and faster than Windows, and because it was a member of our group who owned the Mac we could keep all of the files on it without worrying about losing them or someone else moving them. For the ancillaries a member of our group had their own Microsoft Surface 3. It has direct pen interaction that allowed us to edit the images far more accurately using the touchscreen. Despite the Surface running a low powered Intel Atom processor we were able to run multiple layers and intense effects on Photoshop without it slowing down too dramatically, which is an issue we had with the school computers. We were also able to install custom typography onto the Surface, which meant that we could use it on both of the ancillaries and the video. We could not use the group member’s Surface to edit the music video because iMovie isn’t available on Windows 10, and the processor isn’t fast enough to handle professional video editing- also pairing the slower processor with only 4GB of RAM, there would’ve been significant slowdown in response time which isn’t good during video editing.   

Examples of more diverse and inventive shots, due to the use of two different cameras:

The above shots were filmed using an iPhone and this allowed us to get closer to the objects and move the iPhone around to make it pan around the object.

The DSLR camera and tripod were helpful when filming extreme close ups of the lips and shots of the actress when she is sat still because it helped us make sure that the shots would not be shaky and the actress could move around the frame or stay still rather as opposed to the iPhone when we could move the shot around the object instead.

To present all of our blog work this year, we created two blogs to makes it organised and easier to navigate. On one blog we would create our individual posts and then use the HTML links on these posts to put onto the pages on our main blog. The tabs used were ‘Home,’ ‘Preliminary,’ ‘Research,’ ‘Planning,’ ‘Production’ and ‘Evaluation’. These tabs were a very effective way of organising our work so that it was easy to navigate and find certain posts because the links in each tab redirected to the posts on the first blog. This meant that the work could be done in any order or I could add any posts and the main blog will still be organised. Blogger also allows you to embed videos and has a useful feature that allows you to embed a YouTube video while still on your Blogger post. However one downfall with Blogger is that it is very difficult to post photos to accompany the blog post you are working on because they do not stay in one position and you cannot manually resize they to what you desire as you would be able to in a Word Document. In order to use Blogger it is necessary to have a Google account. This also links any services owned by Google to you account for example YouTube. This became very useful because to use any Google services, I only needed one account and could log into Google with my Blogger and YouTube accounts readily logged in and available.