Evaluation: Question 4- Jenna Pinder

Throughout our project the technology we used has been extremely helpful in making our products, both music video and print products.

We've been using an Apple iMac throughout our work, to allow us to get the professional quality that was required for our products and of the industry. Using an Apple iMac also introduced us to the programmes Final Cut Express, where we edited our videos, PhotoShop, where we edited our photos, and InDesign, which allows us to layout our photos to the appropriate shapes such as the album inserts and more graphical options.

I found using PhotoShop particularly straightforward as I had used this program in my previous year to create my music magazine. However by using it for a second year running I was able to enhance these skills and experiment on such things such as gradient feathering to give effects to my texts in the album cover and adding layers to get different colour filters to achieve various effects. InDesign was considerably easier than PhotoShop as, for most of the inside panels of our albums, it was all about the placement of text and images, whereas the Montage page was all about the balance between the artists images, locations and costume to take into consideration. However  using final cut was a challenge for me as I had never used this program, but through practising and from the help of my group I was able to learn the basics fairly quickly and progress my skills throughout creating our music video.

One website which we used was YouTube. Firstly YouTube allowed us to generate our ideas when we were in at planning stage and were deciding which song to choose for a final music video. Through being able to watch many music videos, we were able to rule out genres we disliked or music videos that would be very difficult to recreate as our own without copying the original. In order to analyse music videos from other Pop/grime and to gain an understanding how to target our audience, we used the website YouTube, which allowed us to watch mainstream videos, when trying to analyse an audience, and watch other pop/grime videos which we analysed for our planning, to help us locate our target audience for our artist.

During our research, and parts of our planning stage, we used the search engine Google to find out information regarding the charts (to see how popular our genre was) and also to locate images of other pop/grime artists and images of album covers which we could analyse.  

We used two other websites to upload our PowerPoint's and word documents – slideshare and scribd. These not only allows word documents but also allows PowerPoint's to be uploaded, which was incredibly helpful efficient and reliable.

The final main website in which we used was blogger, which was the website in which we showcased our coursework from beginning to end. Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. This site was easy accessible to both us as students and to teachers. Coursework feedback could be left via the blog which could be then accessed by us from home or at college.

Offline programs which we used to create some content such as analysing music videos, were Microsoft PowerPoint and Microsoft Word. These programs allowed us to create graphs and charts for research and audience feedback purposes.

To create our music video we used various equipment within the studio. This included the HD video camera, a tripod, and various lighting and the green screen.

 Not only did we use the lighting equipment for the filming, we also used this for our images. To take these images a DSLR was to achieve the highest quality of images.

Once we had filmed our music video and our photo shoot, we began our work on Final Cut Express and Adobe Photoshop. First we uploaded an mp3 version of our song "Tik Tok " and then placed our footage along the time line. We then did a clean out edit, taking out the

shots that showed our artist laughing, forgetting her lines or shots that didn’t particularly work. Once we cleared out the footage we than begin placing our variety of shots onto the timeline making sure there were plenty of different shots including close-ups, medium shots and long shots. The difficult to part to this was making sure the lip syncing was in time, which took a considerable amount of time and perserverance Once we finished our video we rendered it and exported it to get the correct format in order to be able to upload it to YouTube. From YouTube our music video was then embedded on our blog.