Evaluation Question 4

I began research and planning by looking at different music videos, and looking at how each individual artist would approach their video, and what was genre specific. For example, rock bands, such as Bring Me The Horizon had more shots that were purely to show performance, and then alternate shots to show other aspects. However, rap videos would incorporate the two, so as to show the artist lip-syncing with the music whilst not actually being in a performance-specific shot, and acting at the same time. As we had a band, we had to show a clear contrast between the performance and the story-line shots.

In our A2 Media Coursework production, we used a wide variety of different media technologies, for all different stages of the production, ranging from editing software, to recording devices, to social networks. 

For the editing and main producing of the video, we used Final Cut Pro, which we felt was the best for what we wanted to do, as it was easy to use, and it had all the different effects that we wanted to use, such as the colour-filtering and the different lense views we could put onto different shots within the video.

This contrasted with other editing formats that we have tried to use before, such as Windows Movie Maker, which was a lot more complicated for what it was, and the end result was not as good as it might have been had we used Final Cut. 

This was also beneficial as it helped us to get exactly what it was we wanted out of the post-production in the way of making it unique and specific to the band.

Within our research, we stuck to the social networking side of things, for example with Twitter and YouTube, as it was easier for us to reach out to the target audience and find out what it is they’d like to see within our production.

It also made it a lot simpler to find people with similar interests to the usual target audience, meaning their input would be more reliable than someone who didn’t care particularly. Also, on YouTube it was very easy to find other media productions of a similar genre, from which we were able to draw inspiration from, and alter our own production. By having all of these different ways of getting inspiration/feedback, it was far easier to have an idea of how to improve our production, alongside knowing what to do next in order for it to look good.

We not only used digital technology for our video, but also for our other ancillaries, such as the digipak and the magazine advert. We created both on PhotoShop, on the macs, which was very good as it had so many different options, especially with the layering and the altering of the image. It also allowed us to find a very effective font for the band. This helped us to make the band more unique and alternate, as where if we’d have used a different editing format, we may have struggled with this, due to a minimal selection of editing tools, making the end result dull, and even generic.