Evaluation 4 (Writing)

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

For our research and planning, we were eager to try out new techniques that we had previously studied but had not done before, which meant we needed to do a series of practice shots.  We spent one afternoon in our chosen locations using a DSLR camera to practice these techniques that we wanted to include in our video.  We alternated between using a tripod and free hand to see what would work best for certain shots and mutually agreed that close-up shots were better for our sequence as they captured more emotion.  We also found that using the camera without a tripod allowed us more movement, which meant we could keep to the conventions of a good music video and not have too many stationary shots.

However, our main focus was to practice and perfect our dolly zooms.  Prior to our practice, we had researched uses of dolly zooms on YouTube to find examples in other films, with most popular examples coming from Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller ‘Vertigo’ and Spielberg’s 1975 film ‘Jaws’.  As we had no prior practice of filming them ourselves, our first attempts were not successful - we had to tread over uneven ground which complicated the technique and made the footage shaky. However, by the end of the practice run we had managed to get a few shots we were happy with and, with the aid of stabilization in final cut we were able to smooth the footage out. Whilst constructing our final footage we continued to use these dolly zooms but chose to position ourselves on smoother ground so we would get better footage. This time, we did not want to have to rely on stabilisation as we found this blurred the shots too much and we wanted to keep a slight shake as this added to the effect and fitted with our rock genre.

As mentioned before, the use of YouTube was instrumental throughout our coursework as it greatly enhanced our research, planning, construction and evaluation. We used the website to discover new techniques and to find aspiration from similar music genres.  This was significant in us finding:

• ·   Suitable locations
• ·         Conventional Lighting
• ·         Prop and Costume design
• ·         Narrative

We also uploaded the sequences we had filmed and prepared within final cut to YouTube, so that we could get feedback from our rough cuts, allowing us to improve our work based on the decisions made by our audience. Our voiceover evaluations were also uploaded to it, to explain some of our decisions whilst the footage was happening.

Newest to us however, was the use of Prezi – an online presentation tool that we could embed into our blogs.  This allowed us to explain and evaluate our choices with ease as we designed our points to be viewed smoothly from one another.  We had some difficulty at first in embedding the finished presentation into our blogs as the sites refused to upload such a large file. However, after watching a brief tutorial we managed to embed the presentation by copying the code into the HTML layout of our blogs.  music genres and then filmed similar locations that we felt would be suitable for our own piece.