Laurens A2 Media Coursework

Hi,
My name is Lauren and I am currently studying Media A2. This blog is my coursework, of creating a music video. Please click on the links on the right to select the work you want to look at. I have labelled all the posts under relveant headings so it is grouped together in a oragainsed way.
Thank you, Hope you enjoy looking :)
Lauren xx

Meeting 48

Since the last meeting, we have all beeen finishing our indivual evaulations and working on editing question 2 together. The project is coming to a close, with the final deadline for everything and the whole evalation by friday. We are confident we will be completed by then becuase the only thing we need to finish now is question 2 editing together and then upload. I am very happy with my evalation.

Meeting 47

13/01/10
Today we all had a free lesson, and as we were all planned and ready, then we recorded our question 2. This went well, but did take longer than we thought. We will now edit it together and also whenever any of us our free.

Moodboards

We created some moodboards to help us devolp our characters and give us some ideas for costumes and scenes etc.


Meeting 46

11/01/2010
During the last week there has been alot of snow and school has been shut etc. Becuase of this there hasn't been an oppertunity for us to get togeteher to record question 2. Instead we have been working indivually on our other parts of the evaluation and hopefully this week we will be able to do question 2, when school is back to normal and we will be together.

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

Media technologies have been very important throughout this whole project. The creation of the video and other tasks would not have been possible without them.
From the research stages the internet has always been very important. It is so easy to use with so much information on it, the internet made this project a lot easier to do. It is such a huge media technology and some sites in particular were essential for this project.

For example, the website YouTube was very useful. It allowed me to find any music videos whenever I wanted, to watch them and start thinking about the conventions and construction of the music videos. It allowed me to watch them in my spare time and also was very useful in the analyse of them as I could pause and repeat whenever I wanted. Also, we uploaded our video onto this site to allow easy access but also to gain feedback which helped in the evaluation stages.

The information I gained from this was very useful and essential for me to go on and make my own music video through all stages. Also, a similar site called Vimeo. We uploaded our finished video onto here and also used as a backup when YouTube wasn’t working.

However, it wasn’t just the site YouTube, MySpace was needed. Not for the beginning stages, but for the construction stages as we created a MySpace internet page. Not only did this social networking site allow us to create our own, but by looking at ones already there it aided our research stage. It has its very own music section which was very useful for the research stages as it allowed us to find artists easily and look at their representation.


Both of these websites were vital for this project. A third vital site was blogger. All of our work for this project is presented electronically, and blogger was a site that allowed us to do this easily. This was used throughout all the stages of this project and was a good way to present all my work in the best way.

Aswell as these 3 sites, the internet helped in many smaller ways too, mostly through the internet search engine Google. For example, looking for html codes and looking at CD covers.

Also, having access to our email so we could keep in contact as a group. At one point, the social networking site Face book came in handy. We wanted a way to keep in contact with our actors at all times, so we could easily arrange shoots as a group all together. One way of doing this was within face book. We all had each other added as friends so could all contact easily, but we could also have group conversations to make plans and arrangements.

This worked really well and helped us stay organized. All of the people we had selected often checked their face book so it was a very convenient way to make plans and keep in contact. A second way we kept in contact was through our mobiles, and finally we used hotmail to make sure everybody involved in this music video knew what was happening etc.

Moving onto the planning stages, different media technologies
were used. One of the very first things we did was too make a storyboard. We used Pro Premier to make a visual storyboard with the song; we then uploaded it to YouTube for easy access. We also put it YouTube to try and get some feedback about what people think about it and any ideas or advice for improvements.

In the planning stages we also used computer programs such as word and excel to plan our shooting schedules and risk assessments.

The media technologies for this wasn’t as important, because we could of found other ways to do this, such as typing straight onto blogger, but by using word etc it helped present in a better way and helped us keep on top of everything in a organised way.

The construction was the section where we relied on media technologies a lot. In order to construct our video we relied on the video camera and also the editing program at school, pro premier. Without this media equipment we wouldn’t have been able to construct our video. We each had our own computer so we during class time we had access to it whenever, it also meant all our footage was kept together on our own computer. We did have a few problems with Adobe Premier Pro; however we gained a lot of experience with using this programme.

None of us had ever used this program before, so it just took a little adapting too. We learnt a lot of new things by using this program. We then used a professional digital camera that Becci owned to take our photographs and try to get them as professional as possible. As well as these for the main video, used other programs on the computer. We used Fireworks for the CD covers and Photoshop and paint to edit the photographs with. All these programs helped to make the best quality product we could. We also needed accessories such as lights and a tripod all to get the best possible shots possible.


Because we had all this different equipment and programmes to use, we had to keep our work very organised so through the computer we set up our own work place for all of our sections to go in. There was a lot of different media programs and equipment to use for this project, but I think we used them all well and for the right things.
The evaluation didn’t require as many media technologies; it required to look through the work that had been done, easily done via Blogger. The evaluation required to use word a lot, and also paint for editing the screenshots taken for it.

Media technologies have been very important for this whole project. We have used a variety all for different things, and I think they have been successful. Even though some of them were new to use and I hadn’t had any experience, I found the skills easy to pick up and think we used media technologies well.