TASK 4

We used many differnet types of media technologies extensively through out the five stages of production.

In our research and development our group used the internet a lot. The internet enabled us to use websites such as youtube, where we were able to watch music videos that could inspire us and give us ideas this was very useful as our group lacked knowledge on the heavy metal genre so we were able to discover the generic approach music videos had to heavy metal. Online music browsing websites such as Itunes helped our group decide upon a song to use in the music video the availability of music over the internet made this a far easier job for us, as sampling music is cheaper and easier online than through CDs and other previous methods used to distribute music. Google made the research far easier by pooling information together where we would previously had to use books to research informatition, particularly google maps for browzing possible locations for the shoot.

In the planning phase of our project we used PowerPoint presentation as a method of sharing our ideas with the class this is very useful software as it is very good at showing simple presentations to a group of people using images and text through slides shows.. We could also then put our presentations online using a website called “slide share” this is a PowerPoint presentation sharing website that we used to make our completed presentations available online and also in order to attach them to our blogs. Our blogs were the method we choose to use to report everything that we did and evaluate it, this method is far more visual and expressive than a formal essay.

On the actual shoot day we used a digital camera, the Sony Z1 and DSR 570, which are very mobile and this allowed us to vary our shots and therefore have a bigger variety to choose from when it came to editing. We used green screen a lot in our video because what we wanted to achieve could not be done on location or created in the studio so the best alternative was to use the green screen the use of the new media technology enabled us to achieve the unique visuals in our video

Due to new media technologies editing was made a lot easier as we were able to view the footage very easily on Final Cut Pro which has a relatively user friendly interface making it far more simple for us, as relatively inexperienced editors. After Effects which play a huge part in our project and are becoming more and more realistic as technologies advance played a huge part in our video and we would never have managed the complex after effect without having a program that manages to simplify them for us.

The back drops for the green screen were created on after effects. These programs made it easier for the synthetics in our video to be achieved when working with a small budget size that we had, no longer do media products need huge budgets to achieve the realistic after effects. It also meant that we didn’t have to waste time on our shoot day travelling to do a location shot.

Before the video finishes we will quickly talk about the distribution of our product.

New media technologies played a huge part in our distribution, video sharing website YouTube was supposed to be the main method of distribution however due to copyright laws it has been an issue and our video was removed by WMG from YouTube so it has been an unsuccessful method for distribution in our case. DVD is also being used as distribution as it is now easier to upload footage onto this format but it is more expensive to distribute via DVD than online however DVD is significantly more cost effective and efficient than VHS due to smaller packaging and less raw materials needed so we decided DVD would be a better format than VHS.. Thanks for taking time to watch our video commentary.