2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
4. How have you used new media technologies in the research, planning, construction and evaluation stages?
During my research I found a lot of help to be gained from the use of the internet and my computer. Through fast search engines such as ‘Google.co.uk’ I was able to search for and locate exactly what I was looking for with ease, for example when looking for background information on the artist ‘KT Tunstall’ I typed in the keywords ‘KT, Tunstall, Suddenly, I, see’ into the search box which brought up a host of results and I found what I was looking for(The genre her music was classed as) quickly and efficiantly from the result for the website Last.fm which is a popular music site, I later referred to this site on numerous occasions for similar queries on other bands. Having such fast search results like this allowed me to be a lot more productive with my time and able to do a lot more work in a shorter space of time and gave me more time to focus on the rest of the project.
When trying to establish what the typical conventions are that are used in ‘Indie’ Music videos I used the websites YouTube, Yahoo Music Station and Google video to search for and view music videos of this genre, to do this I used the facility of looking at videos in terms of their genre which ranged from metal to r&b; Becuase of this I was able to find out that Indie videos usualyy have a fast cutting pace and have frequent close ups of the artists, they also usually have a strong narrative running with the video, we encorporated all of these into our video. Searching by genre also helped as I was not only limited to looking at the bands I was familiar with but could get a broader, more accurate idea of what the conventions were for use with our own video.
When we were looking for a band to use, I used the worldwide social networking site Myspace.com, which is also famous for its music section which allows bands, signed or unsigned to publish their music for online streaming as long as it’s in the MP3 file format. This proved helpful as it saved a lot of what would have been wasted time contacting bands with copy write music where the likelihood they would refuse our request.
When blogging I preferred to use my home computers word processing software, Microsoft Word 2003 as the formatting options were a lot simpler and more familiar than that of blogger. To publish my posts in the same format and layout, like I did with the analysis of KT Tunstall’s music video to Suddenly I see, I used the website SlideShare.net which is a document hosting website where users can share document, slideshows etc with the word in exactly the same way it is presented in their software, the site best handles documents with the file extension ‘.doc’ which is what my software saves documents as which was helpful, it kept all images and text in the same places this saved me having to reposition everything if pasted into blogger.
When constructing we were able to get feedback on certain parts of the video in advance so that we could edit it early, for example we uploaded two versions of the landlord scene from the video to YouTube and asked for feedback which we received, having it online enabled us to get a diversity of opinions and not just those of the people we ask who could be biased, we were also able to show the scenes to anyone wherever we had an internet connection allowing us to get feedback wherever. Also when we gathered feedback online for our main video we didn’t ask a specific question on the video, this meant that misinterpretation of the question couldn’t happen and that we could gather feedback from all aspects of the video for example some of the feedback we got refereed to not only the narrative but the performance and end editing as well.
During the construction process I used the new media technology of different file formats to allow portability of my product, in this case being able to export video clips from iMovie in an .mp4 file format which is what iPods can play. This enabled me to see what I’ve got went out filming or what we needed to get, for example it helped us when we were out filming I had the animatic on my iPod which we could use to give an idea of timings for scenes in the video and as a sort of video style shot list, this sped up the filming process and made the construction a lot smoother. I was also able to export the video as a .3gpp and then use Bluetooth technology to transfer it wirelessly to my mobile phone, being wireless it saved the hassle of cables and installing drivers.
In my evaluation stage I have been again able to use my compact camera to record video of myself with sound answering the three other evaluation questions this helped me express the evaluation a lot better and when editing it enabled me to input screenshots so I could easily refer to specific scenes in the video or other medias directly, for example when I talked about the “I Wish” signs I was able to show an example.