Media technologies were a vital component in all areas of
the production of our video and print work.
In terms of planning, we used Blogger throughout the year to collate and share ideas, as well as using it as a platform
to show all of our research tasks, concept development and logistical planning
for shoots etc. The blog was also used to upload various rough cuts of the
music video, to show its progression, and its development in accordance with
feedback. The blog also provided a place for us to keep track of the
independent progress we made each week, by completing multiple lesson logs a
week. The benefit of this is to show that, while collectively we were working
well and making an equal effort to complete the task, there were also things we
were doing independently to help the project along. The use of a blog made the
process simple and efficient. Aside from having used a blog in the same way for
AS, we found that it makes things altogether clearer, as it creates one place
to house all of our work – group and individual – where it is accessible by
both group members and teachers, and can be edited and improved at any time. It
also allows for more direct and efficient feedback from teachers.
The purpose of
our audience research task was to gauge the clarity of our video and how
appropriate the stylistic choices we had made at that point were. We chose to
use Google Forms, as it helped to keep all of our work linked together. Due to
the fact that we were using blogger (a program accessible through google) along
with Google slides as a medium to present slideshows and pictures, we were able
to combine many different forms of media on our blog: Charts, tables,
presentations etc. Using another google program for our audience research meant
that our results were more easily integrated with our blog. As we had expected,
the majority of answers gained from the audience research task were not
entirely what we would have considered to be ideal answers. However, this was
not an issue as we knew that our chosen genre had few conventions in terms
of music videos, and therefore the audience had very little to base their
feedback on. Nevertheless, we view this as a vital component of the production
process as it gave us an idea of how our video would be received, and if there
was anything we needed to change in order to make it so that the audience would
view the video in the way we had intended.
The program
DaVinci Resolve 12.0 played an instrumental role in our production task. Having
been newly introduced to this program for A-Level, we initially thought that it
would be difficult to get used to using a different software, in order to
produce what we would have hoped to be a very professional piece of work.
However, we soon found that due to our existing knowledge and experience with
other editing software such as Adobe Premier and Sony Vegas, we were more than
capable of using Resolve, and that in fact it was a great deal more
comprehensive and user-friendly. We first had a chance to get to grips with
Resolve when editing footage from the group trip to Brighton. From this we
produced the ‘Brighton Short’ video, which significantly progressed our concept
development as the finished product resembled a lot of our initial ideas for
our actual music video. Once used to Davinci, we were able to use it to edit
the animatic for our video. The tools on Davinci made it easy to simulate the
camera movements we had aimed to use for the actual shots.
During the filming of our music video we used a canon digital HD camera, along with a range of high end lenses. This helped to enhance the quality of our footage, as well as allowing for a high frame rate, which was imperative for our concept as we had planned to slow down the speed of the majority of our footage. We think the slow-motion style adds to the seamlessness of our video, and the 60 frames per second rate that we were able to film at ensured the smoothness of the footage once slowed down. One of the lenses we used was a canon 24-70mm. This particular lens offered an extremely wide angle, which gave us a massive advantage when filming in suburban and city environments. The wide angle also provided a much more professional aesthetic, especially for tracking shots. The vivid colours that the canon camera was able to capture meant that none of the quality of our shots was lost. The best example of this is the range of ‘warm’ colours that can be seen during the tracking shots towards the end of the song.
For the
digipak and magazine advert, we chose to shoot the images on 35mm film as it
added another dimension to the visuals of the campaign, while the vintage
aesthetics of the images would match the retro sound of DeMarco’s music. However,
shooting on film meant that firstly, we could not view the pictures we had
taken on location instantly, as with digital. Therefore, as a precaution, I attempted
to re-create the images as accurately as I could on the digital camera we were
using for filming. This meant that if anything went wrong with the originals during
processing, we would have digital backups. Another drawback of analogue is that
the images are less compatible with editing etc. than digital photos. This only
meant that we had to ensure the quality of the raw images, by focussing on
lighting, content and composition whilst on location.
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