Research and Planning
Construction
Video:
Panasonic HC-V250 & Tripod
For filming we used a panasonic HC-V250 and a tripod. We used
these as from research and planning we had tested the quality and it was the best we had tested. It was also some equipment we were familiar with in comparison to other video cameras. We used the tripod to stabilise the footage we were taking and the camera because it had recording capabilities. The benefits of this was that the footage captured was good quality and it was easily compatible with the macs to import the footage onto final cut express. It was also very portable and not heavy to transport. The tripod also allowed us to extend the height of the camera above where we could reach or keep stability, it allowed for a lot of creative shots that we wouldn't be able to do. The downside was if the lighting wasn't controlled or if you tried to zoom in the footage would lose quality but it wasn't too bad.
Canon Camera
During filming for the performance we used the college's canon stills cameras. We did this to get some good shots of the band performing so we could later use it on the website and digipak.
Alongside normal photos it showed the band as being at a show. The camera was very helpful as it was easy to use and produced good quality images that we could further edit to make them look interesting and less like they were in a room at college and more like they were on stages.
Props
During filming we had to use a lot of props to get the proper look we wanted in the video. We clearly
had to use instruments such as Drums, Bass, Microphone, Guitar, Amps. This was to give the "band" a look of professionally when performing. We used these as well because we could easily borrow them from college and which meant we could use them for an extended period of time. The benefits was that the actors could use the instruments effectively and play the song along tot he music we played over the speakers and in the end we could easily sync up the music with the song. We didn't have any access issues since the band members either owned them or we could borrow them from college.
In comparison for the narrative we used Jackets, Photo frames, Photos, Phone. These were all used to make the narrative more realistic. I supplied the photo frames from a charity shop and i used free photos off google to fill them. We used a phone and a jacket to give the actor something to interact with whilst walking or when he's angry. The benefits of this was that it made the narrative have more interesting than just having actors interact. It also made it more naturalistic. The only real issue with the props was that they were quite hard to transport over to scenes and to keep remembering how many we had. The only issue was that Conor was supposed to get the images but then I had to rush to get the photos and frames.
had to use instruments such as Drums, Bass, Microphone, Guitar, Amps. This was to give the "band" a look of professionally when performing. We used these as well because we could easily borrow them from college and which meant we could use them for an extended period of time. The benefits was that the actors could use the instruments effectively and play the song along tot he music we played over the speakers and in the end we could easily sync up the music with the song. We didn't have any access issues since the band members either owned them or we could borrow them from college.
In comparison for the narrative we used Jackets, Photo frames, Photos, Phone. These were all used to make the narrative more realistic. I supplied the photo frames from a charity shop and i used free photos off google to fill them. We used a phone and a jacket to give the actor something to interact with whilst walking or when he's angry. The benefits of this was that it made the narrative have more interesting than just having actors interact. It also made it more naturalistic. The only real issue with the props was that they were quite hard to transport over to scenes and to keep remembering how many we had. The only issue was that Conor was supposed to get the images but then I had to rush to get the photos and frames.
Final Cut Express
Final Cut Express is an editing software on the apple macs. It allows you to import clips and music, edit them and then export. We used this as it was accessible from the macs and we were familiar with how we edited from last year doing film openings. The advantages was that it allowed us to fully edit the music video along with the music imported. FCE also had a lot of quick shortcuts that made editing quick and simple. To get the black and white affect FCE had colour corrector which allowed us to turn down the saturation and mess with the blacks and whites to change the density of the darker colours. Some downsides was the rendering as it took a long time to render a number of clips before we
could use them. Another being that it was only on the macs and therefore couldn't edit the video at home or away from the macs. It slowed down the process a lot. However FCE was a very beneficial tool to creating the music video.
Youtube
Youtube allowed us to upload our product after it was done. We used this as it's easy to upload and you can put it as unlisted and therefore not get the video taken down for copyright. It also is compatible with the file that final cut lets you export as and the file wasn't too big to not be able to upload. A backup would be Vimeo however in comparison it takes a bit longer to upload it and it has more of a danger as it could get taken down quicker. We also used youtube to upload rough cuts, this allowed us to see how the video looks on the screen without editing and allowed us to share it out to get feedback from the public. We used You tube for this as it allowed us to share what we were doing to the audience.
Digipak:
Photoshop
The main photo editing software we used was Photoshop CS6. This allowed us to make a digipak 
and accessible. As i had CS6 at home i was able to work on the digipak outside of college and even
other items such as magazine covers or promotional images. This allowed me to develop my skills away from the lessons and gave me more time to work with our product to keep improving it and trying out new ideas. Photoshop had many benefits to making our digipak and even making images for the website. It allowed us to make photos black and white and work with the photo work space to fully focus on editing them. The layer system also allowed for a lot more creativity as you could overlay effects over image and not affect the original one, The downsides is when the files got too big i couldn't save them at home but at college the macs were able to support it, another being many of the group didn't know how to use Photoshop and therefore we hit slow patches where we didn't know what we were doing to overcome this we all worked together to help each other when we were stuck.
DaFont.com
Dafont is a free font website that allows you to easily download creator made fonts free of charge. Using this site allowed for us to use fonts pre-installed which added a lot more creation to our digipak. We were able to find fonts that suited our genre a lot better than if we were to use the fonts just on the system. It was easy to test out a number of fonts to find the best to use as all you had to do was download them. The only negative was that sometimes fonts didn't work with the macs and therefore we weren't able to use this, however since i could use Photoshop at home and Dafont i could just do it there then save it and bring it to the lesson.
Brusheezy.com
This site is what i used to get a lot of the smokey brush effects i used for the digipak. CS6 has a big community base that creates free brushes to download to use, therefore finding a site that hosted free brushes was very easy and made the whole process of a smokey look a lot easier. I used Brusheezy against other sites as the smokey brushes had a lot of variations and was the only one's i really liked the look of.
This site is what i used to get a lot of the smokey brush effects i used for the digipak. CS6 has a big community base that creates free brushes to download to use, therefore finding a site that hosted free brushes was very easy and made the whole process of a smokey look a lot easier. I used Brusheezy against other sites as the smokey brushes had a lot of variations and was the only one's i really liked the look of.
Canon Digital Camera
To get images for the digipak and website to use we had to do photo shoots. I did both of them using the college's still cameras (Canon). I used this as it was the only one available at the time that produced good quality images that i could edit. Luckily i was familiar with how the camera worked and therefore it was easy for me to use and the photoshoots went along smoothly. Initially the first one was done in the park at college, a lot of the images came out hard to edit or not professional enough so we held another photo shoot in the photo room at college. These images came out easier to edit due to the white background.
To get images for the digipak and website to use we had to do photo shoots. I did both of them using the college's still cameras (Canon). I used this as it was the only one available at the time that produced good quality images that i could edit. Luckily i was familiar with how the camera worked and therefore it was easy for me to use and the photoshoots went along smoothly. Initially the first one was done in the park at college, a lot of the images came out hard to edit or not professional enough so we held another photo shoot in the photo room at college. These images came out easier to edit due to the white background.
Google
During the second photoshoot i found it difficult to organised the band into position. I therefore used google image search to look up images of the band we drew inspiration from and asked the group to do similar photos. This in turn allowed for me to get a lot of good images that were stereotypical of
bands. (Luckily the guys found it quite fun and did all the posing). I used google images since it was convenient and what i had at the time to quickly find images for the band to mimic. This overall helped with construction of the digipak as i had a lot of good images to choose from and work with.
During the second photoshoot i found it difficult to organised the band into position. I therefore used google image search to look up images of the band we drew inspiration from and asked the group to do similar photos. This in turn allowed for me to get a lot of good images that were stereotypical of
bands. (Luckily the guys found it quite fun and did all the posing). I used google images since it was convenient and what i had at the time to quickly find images for the band to mimic. This overall helped with construction of the digipak as i had a lot of good images to choose from and work with.
You Tube
I used You Tube a lot as to save proof of my construction process. I recorded my progress with hypercam 2 and uploaded it to You tube in a sped up version. I used You tube as i was familiar with the site and it would allow me to upload as many videos i want. This also allowed me to show how i created certain effects with the digipak so i could then show the group or other members of the class so they could try as well. I also used You tube to upload other types of process videos such as creating the website.
Befunky.com
This website allows you to create collages of images, i used this for one of the panels where i drew inspiration from one of the kooks' digipaks. It allows you to import images and quickly make a collage with as many images as you want. I used it as it was quick and easy out of the most i looked
at. It also allows you to save directly to your computer and therefore it allowed me to bring it into photo shop with ease. Website;
Wix.com
To create the entire website we used a free service called Wix.Com. This website allows new users to create their own website with free and easy tools. It was a very helpful site to use as it was amazingly easy to produce our own type of website. It had templates or you could start from scratch, we used templates to give us a starting point from there we could customize and edit as much as we wanted. Good points about wix is that it was online and therefore the entire group could go on the site and contribute to it, despite the fact we all couldn't go on at the same time but otherwise it was really helpful to distribute the work out as we could each work on a page. Also Uploading images and videos was very easy plus it had an online storage on the site where we can just select images, this helped with putting logos on each page. Wix also allows you to create more than one site and this was very helpful when we decided to re-start our sites as we could go back to the old one and see what needed improving and changing for the new site. The pages as well were very easy to navigate and adding anchors allowed us to make sub pages. Wix was overall very easy to use and helped us a lot when trying to make our first websites as we didnt need to mess with HTML coding or embed anything and it all operated using links or uploading images.
Photoshop CS6
For most of the images on the website we had to use photo shop to create them. I used CS6 to create; Images for Gallery, Gifs, the Logo and Band merchandise. As I've said before i had Photoshop at home and therefore could use it to create other images outside of college. Plus my familiarity with the program allowed for quick editing and more creative designs. The quick editing and tools allowed me to have flexibility with what i wanted to create for the website. Photoshop also allowed me to change the work space from photography to animation which is what allowed me to make the gifs we wanted on the website. I did this by using Final Cut Express to get the necessary clips and to cut them down, i then exported them then used Photoshop to import it using video frames to layers and from
there you can just edit the clips how you wanted then export it as a gif by saving it for web. To make the website we mainly used Photoshop CS6 for all types of gallery or image seen even for the logo. Making the logo i used a Four leaf clover image from Google then a specially made font from Dafont.com. (As you can see in process video below). Overall photoshop was one of the most useful software we had whilst creating all three of our products as it allowed for numerous types of editing and various compatibility with sites. It was the biggest help with barely any downsides.
there you can just edit the clips how you wanted then export it as a gif by saving it for web. To make the website we mainly used Photoshop CS6 for all types of gallery or image seen even for the logo. Making the logo i used a Four leaf clover image from Google then a specially made font from Dafont.com. (As you can see in process video below). Overall photoshop was one of the most useful software we had whilst creating all three of our products as it allowed for numerous types of editing and various compatibility with sites. It was the biggest help with barely any downsides.
All Three: (Technologies used to export/import)
Blogger
I used blogger to keep all the proof and evidence of the construction of the final products. I used blogger as we used them last year and it is easy to create a post, upload images, upload videos etc. It's very user friendly and i am used to using the site. The advantages of this is that it allows me to make as many posts as i want and make them as long as i want, this lets me keep all my ideas and construction in one place so its very easy to find. This also help show my journey and how i have improved and changed my ideas with construction. It is also online and therefore i can use it wherever i go even on my mobile and therefore i can create and easily upload posts wherever i am.
Overall for construction we used a mixture of Hardware,Software and Online sites and apps to fully construct all 3 products.
Evaluation;
Evaluation Question 1
I decided to use emaze to present this as it is a different type of presentation software i haven't used before. Instead of having a lot of text and images i thought using a presentation software would be better to look at. Emaze had a lot of similar advantages to prezi.com. There was only 1 disadvantage of the images being slightly bad resolution but other than that it was easy to use this new media technology.
Evaluation Question 2
When evaluating my three products against each other i decided to use Google Slides. I mainly did this because i knew i would be able to work on it at home as it has online capabilities that allow me to access it from anywhere with an internet connection, even using my phone. It also works with google images, youtube and uploading images and files which is what i needed to upload images and proof of my work. Google Slides also allows me to save everything as a .pptx (powerpoint) so i then can upload it to Slideshare which allows me to present and embed my powerpoint into my Blog.
Evaluation Question 3
When answering this question i decided to do a mixture of a blogpost and a prezi. I decided to write the basics down in a blogpost as it was easy to just write and explain audience feedback and how important it is. I then created a Prezi to host my audience feedback and my explanation of it. I used prezi because it is a very good and creative presentation software to use that allows me to showcase images, videos, text and many more. I just thought it would be the easiest to use to quickly put up all my evidence of audience feedback and to write how it affected my work.
