Evaluation Question 4: how did you use media technologies in the construction of research, planning and evaluation stages?

I have used a number of technologies to record and represent our music video. Without these, the music video wouldn't of been able to be filmed or recorded. The first media technology which I used to record making our potential media music video was Blogger. Here, it has allowed me to publish my research and planning for my music video. With this media technology, I was allowed to look back at my blog posts and refer back to them to see what conventions i would need for an indie music video. Blogger has also allowed me to be more organised, so that I can see what my time management posts are like and what I need to do and when. When looking back through my blog, I can see the developments, for example from my rough cut to my final cut I can see a clear difference which blogger has helped so that I can see what I have done different and the changes which I have made to the music video. 

We used a video camera to film our entire music video. We filmed both the narrative and the performance, we wanted to film with the same camera so that there was no quality difference between the performance and narrative, as this could have looked slightly unbalanced and wouldn't link in with our indie genre.  With this video camera, I used a tripod so that the video camera wouldn't shake within the performance, which would overall look quite unprofessional. However, for the narrative we wanted to film with the video camera in my hand to give a road trip feel and also to make it look like it is a persons point of view.

We then used final cut express to edit the footage which we filmed. This software is professional which allows you to pick from a variety of options to help your video gain quality and look like a real music video. We used this software on a Mac, this was fast and allowed us to edit without any problems. As we put together a mini music video earlier in the year, this helped as we already knew what to do with this software, which made it easier for us to edit straight away without figuring anything out first. Final cut express allowed us to capture all of our footage and also combine both the narrative and the performance elements of the music video. We also used another type of software called Photoshop. Within this software, I was able to edit my digipak photographs and print advertisement photograph. This software heed me to put this all together such as the writing, images and logos. Photoshop is a professional software which many use to gain a high quality image or design. You can edit photographs with filters, colour, saturation, brightness, contrast and many more options and elements. I overall chose this software to use in particular over others such as Indesign, as I am most familiar with this one through the other subjects which I take such as graphics and photography.  

Another media technology I used was a website called Slideshare. I used this to upload my office presentations as blogger will not upload these straight from your computer. The reason why I liked to use Slideshare is because it didn't make my blog repetitive and boring with long blocks of text. Also, by using power point presentations, it displayed my work clearer to the viewer. Another website which I see quite a lot was Youtube. I firstly used YouTube to research current indie music videos and analyse them with detail. It also allowed us to find the unsigned band who's song we used throughout our project to create a music video to. We also used YouTube to upload our rough cut, final cut and audience feedback. This is an easy website to use so we thought that this will display a high quality and fast clip of our music video. 

Evaluation Question 3: What have you learned from your audience feedback?

Audience feedback has helped me greatly to improve our music video and to also see what I could do to relate to my indie genre. I have asked a range of audiences, all of which are my targeted audience or who relate to the indie genre.

The first audience feedback which we firstly asked our targeted audience about was our Pitch which we presented, which was full of ideas which we had for our potential music video. After we had presented our pitch, the audience was able to write down on paper what they thought would work and what wouldln't. We then collected the results which helped us to change our planning for our music video. Within our pitch, we firstly planned to go to the beach and document our road trip. However, when recieveing our audience feedback, this made us realise that our potential music video would maybe be too overexagerated and far fetched as we would not be able to film our music video in a day as we may need to keep going back to film extra scenes. 

The next audeince feedback we gained was for the rough cut. We wanted to know if our music video was firstly right and fitted in with the indie genre and also if they could understand the storyline which we had. We brought together a group which we thought fitted in with our target audience (this was important as these were the type of people who would view our music video) and played our rough cut to them whilst videoing their reaction and comments on how and what ways we could improve our music video. The sorts of things which were mentioned through our audience feedback was how the lip syncing was slightly off and how there wasn't much performance within our music video overall. After hearing this feedback we made huge improvements to our editing of the lip syncing. However, we still felt that it was slightly off, so we decided to refilm the whole performance part again as our targeted audience felt that there wasn't a lot of it. We filmed the performance within the drama studio as our audience suggested that it may be better so that they could then see the clear difference between the performance and the narrative. When we had finished with filming our performance and edited it together, we instantly saw the difference on how better it looked and higher quality.
I also think that for my print adverts, audience feedback helped me greatly to chose what colour scheme, fonts and images to use and which would appeal to my targeted audience.  They overall thought that i should edit my photographs slightly and maybe to put a filter onto them so that they appealed slightly more to the indie genre. there wasn't anything drastic to change as they already liked the idea of all print adverts and music video linking together. Having audience feedback has helped me as they are almost getting what they would like to see in stores and having it their own way.