How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
I found that technology was very empowering in the planning stage of my music video as I was easily able to access information without having to go out and locate it. This was really simple as all I needed to do was search key terms in the search engine Google and pick what sources I wanted to use from the range offered. The downside of this is that in this internet age anyone is able to post information online to it is difficult to tell if the information is reliable as it is not always obvious who posted it. On the other hand, this empowers producers to create content that can easily be accessed by a large audience thus promoting the democratisation of ideas and means that large conglomerates do not have a monopoly over the spread of information. It also encourages the audience to use technology in a similar way to producers and allows them to become prosumers who are able to create and share their own content. I used Scribd to upload the call sheets and risk assessments to my blog and Issuu to upload my
music video treatment. Both of these platforms allow you to publish Word or PDF documents and give you an embed code so you can share them to your blog. This was useful because you are not able to post a Word document directly onto Blogger and instead need to use a publishing software to do so. Scribd promotes the democratisation of ideas because users are able to act as prosumers because they are able to access content from publishers as well as sharing their own content. This content is uploaded onto a public site so that anyone can see what you have published and it may be suggested to other users when they are looking at similar content. Issuu presents your document as if you are turning the pages of a book or magazine. This allows ideas that would traditionally be printed and distributed on paper to be quickly and easily distributed without the cost associated with printing. This empowers producers as publishers aren’t held back by the cost.
While this is empowering as you are able to share information and ideas with ease, there could be issues from using these. Once you have published your document online for the public to see you have little control over what happens to it afterwards. The only way you can prevent people from sharing the document further without your permission is to adjust the settings so it is only accessible by you.
Technology was also helpful in allowing me to get a song to make the video for. I used the website Jamendo to download a copyright free song from an unsigned artist. This allowed me to create my own content to create a music video without fear of it being taken down for copyright reasons when I shared it on YouTube. I was also able to carry out research into the fairly unknown band by looking on their Facebook and VK pages. As the band are from Ukraine, not all of the posts were in English but I was able to translate the posts easily using automatic translations provided by Facebook and Google. This meant that the language barrier was taken away by technology so that I was able to access information that wasn’t originally in my native language.
In addition, I was easily able to contact the band using social media. I used Facebook Messenger to ask the band for a lyric sheet. This allowed to almost instantaneous communication so took away barriers there would previously have been in contacting a band who are in another country. I also used Facebook Messenger to create a closed group to carry out my focus group. This was used to prevent bias as the group wouldn’t have to feedback to my face so this would make them feel more at ease as it would feel less personal. This would mean that they wouldn’t take into account that they knew me and instead would offer an honest critique of the products. This was also done for practical reasons as it was difficult to find a time and place to get the group together where they would be able to view the music video so using technology to do this enabled me to send the link to the music video to them so they could watch it that way.
I used Piktochart to present my research in a visual way. The format allows you to create the infographic in different ‘blocks’, which allows you to split it into sections to make it more reader-friendly. Piktochart was very flexible as you can upload images to include in the infographic and you can pick from a range of layouts. Piktochart is useful for creating infographics and sharing information as it allows you to create professional looking graphics to share to a blog. I used YouTube to research existing music videos. YouTube was particularly helpful because YouTube is hugely popular platform so there are many other platforms, such as Tubechop and ytCropper. These platforms are not affiliated with YouTube and were instead developed by independent individuals, which means that they are less reliable. I had this issue with Tubechop as it stopped working and meant that the video clips could no longer be viewed. However, I found there were several other similar platforms that had been created by other developers so I opted to use ytCropper instead. I also used YouTube to watch Premier Pro and After Effects tutorials. I found that this empowered my creativity because there are a lot of tools you can use in this software and it can be difficult to identify what the best one is for what you want to do. The YouTube tutorials were helpful as I could teach myself how to use tools that I was unfamiliar with. Additionally, I used YouTube to upload videos to my blog. Blogger doesn’t allow you to upload video directly onto Blogger in the same way as you can with images so you must upload it via another platform. It was particularly easy to
upload videos via YouTube as it is in the Google conglomerate so the platforms are linked therefore they work together well.
I used a Canon 600D and 70D camera to film my music video as this was easily accessible and was close to industry standard equipment. I used a digital camera as it enabled me to instantly see the footage meaning that I could edit it almost immediately after filming. This also allowed for easier editing as you are no longer forced to physically cut footage and can instead use software such as Premier Pro to edit it. This is far more practical than working with film as you can easily undo edits if you change your mind or you can add effects that wouldn’t be possible when using film. The main issue with using technologies such as Premier Pro is that you are tempted to keep adjusting the effects because you can do so rather than needing to. This can be counterproductive as you could adjust the footage too much and make it look artificial and unrealistic. Premier Pro is easier and quicker to edit with than cutting and editing film so you tend to make changes more impulsively than the consideration you would have to put in before making a permanent change to a reel of film. I used Thinglink to annotate my ancillary product designs as well as to evaluate strengths and issues in my location recce. Thinglink allows you to add paragraphs of text in various places of a picture, using icons that the reader should hover over to read the text. This makes the text more interactive and separates the text so it is easier for the reader to follow. Thinglink is flexible as it allows you to upload a range of image formats and sizes. However, the main drawback was that you could only include one picture in each Thinglink post so if you wanted more than one image you had to do these separately. I didn’t find this too much of an issue because you could embed multiple Thinglink images into a Blogger post. Another platform I used to present information was Prezi, which I used when researching my print products and to show the use of Photoshop in my print products. This enabled me to present information in an interactive way and I could upload images I had taken to make it more visual. I found this useful as a producer as you can control the order that the reader sees the information in, unlike in Thinglink. This means that you can present your ideas as a process to reflect the thought process behind them. I used Photoshop to edit the images I used in my print products. This allowed me to make slight changes to
the colour balance and hue to create a different tone. This was helpful because it was not possible to create this when I was shooting the image due to the natural lighting and season the images were taken in so it was empowering to be able to make these changes easily using technology. I also used Photoshop to create my print products. This was more difficult than using pen and paper because it was difficult to tell what the image would look like full size and how the colours would come out printed because the backlit screen changes what the colours look like. For this reason, I had to keep printing out the products to check that the colours weren’t too dark and I had to adjust it when this was the case.
Overall, I found that the use of technologies empowered me because it equipped me with the tools I needed to create the product I had planned and provided information to inform me how to use technologies in the construction stages. Technology was also important in pre-production as I could research the genre and the band, which helped me make informed decisions when I planned my products. Furthermore, technology allowed me to act as a prosumer as I could the content I had created to several different platforms and could link this all together by embedding onto my Blogger blog.