Question 4- How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Throughout all stages of creating my music video and digipak media technologies have been incredible important. The first thing we did in lesson was do research and watch several children’s TV openings and music videos to see which one we as individuals felt we would be able to achieve.

However with regards to technological determinism I was able to control the technology rather than the technology directed us in a path that it seemed to want us to take to produce our music video.

Our teacher showed us these clips from ‘YouTube’ through using a projector to show the class.

Here are two of the clips that we watched. Being able to watch these we were able to analyse all clips and then see what we felt would be realistic to achieve ourselves.
Another reason why I used YouTube was so that we would be able to share our music video with others. This would allow us to gain audience feedback outside of our social groups.

We named our video ‘Final Video- fly around the world’ and in the ‘information’ section on the right of the video we wrote ‘I DO have permission from the copyright holder of this music to broadcast it as part of an educational exercise’ so that there would be no problems in distributing the music.

I also used YouTube to help me with my production work. In my research and planning I realised how popular ‘picture and picture’ was within music videos so that influenced wanted to include ‘picture in picture’ in my music video. However due to last year I made the opening to a horror movie and therefore didn’t use features such as ‘picture in picture’ I did not know how to achieve this. As there are several groups within my class who all needed help from the teacher, I decided to turn to the internet for help. I typed into google: ‘How to produce ‘picture in picture’ in premiere pro’. This then gave me a list of possible tutorials which I would be able to read to help me. However I am a visual learning and believe that I learn more by watching how something is done. I noticed that one of the links was a YouTube link which had a four minute video tutorial.



After watching this I then knew how to produce ‘picture in picture’ which I did a test for.

When taking photos I used a Nikon N60 DSLR, with a memory card in so that we would be able to hold all of our photos on for the whole photo shoot. This equipment meant that we could take great quality photos and have the ability to alter the settings such as focus and iris size manually to make the photo quality what we wanted. Then to film our music video we used the college DV Cameras.

Social networking sites also played a major role in creating my music video. Firstly we were given the task of finding our own band to email to ask permission to use their music. For this I thought that the best social networking site would be ‘Myspace’.

When I had found several bands and artists which I liked I then emailed all of them with the same email (in my research and planning LINK TO BLOG POST) asking whether using their music would be acceptable. After sending several emails we were shocked to see that all of the emails sent received a reply of ‘yes’. This then gave us another issue of having to decide which band/artist we would rather use. We were able to decide this by listening to all of their music on their Myspace and then try and think of ways in which we would be able to express the ideas of the lyrics with an appropriate music video to compliment the music.

Facebook is another social networking site which I used which I found a very useful source of feedback and distribution of our video.

Here you can see ‘Lauren Mullen’ (I) posted my music video onto my facebook profile which was ‘liked’ by a friend of mine ‘Ole Bastoo’ who also does Media Studies at our college. Another student in my Media Class then commented on my post with:

This was nice to have some criticism about the technical problems which I wish I would have been able to alter.

My band ‘Lights and Sounds’ also have facebook. Therefore I was able to find more out about their target audience by looking at their profiles.