Blogger
We used blogger to store all of our research, ideas and filming updates in one easy acccesible place. Blogger was useful as we were able to embed links to video clips from websites such as www.youtube.com. It also enabled us to put pictures into our work, this was very useful when we wanted to show the rest of the group a still of a particular shot which inspired us or wanted to try and replicate.
Another advantage of using blogger is that we were able to comment on the posts which a member of our group uploaded. This was particularly useful in our research phase of production because we could share ideas and comment on each other’s work so that we could make collaborative decisions on what ideas to use or discard.
Blogger is an online site, which means that without access to the internet you cannot upload any work, this is why it is important to plan when you are going to do each piece of research and put it onto the blog otherwise it I easy to fall behind.
We also found that on blogger our background picture meant that the font was difficult to see, therefore we went through all of our previous posts and highlighted the text in white. This was not a huge problem, but this time could have been spent doing something a little more productive.
Animatic
In our group the animatic was very important, although we did not stick to the shots which we originally thought, the animatic allowed us to see just how many shots we needed in order to cover all of our track. It was at this point that we realised just how many different shots are needed in a music video, which is significantly more than was in our film opening for AS last year.
After watching the animatic we decided that our track was too long and we did not want to have to repeat the same shots so we used a music editing software programme to cut our music down by about 15 seconds. Although this does not seem very much, in terms of shots it is a significant amount. We would have never solved this problem so early on if it was not for the animatic.
Audience
We used ICT for our audience research by making a questionnaire on www.surveymonkey.co.uk and posting the link to our survey up on a popular social networking site, facebook. The survey was available to all of my friends on facebook, this was useful because the majority of the people who had access to it were teenage girls, which is the target audience or Bruno Mars.
Photoshop
I used photoshop for my print work, which was a four pane digipak. I started by downloading a template for this digipak and opening it in a blank photoshop document. We wanted to create a cohesive star image, to do this we wanted all of our ancillary products to have the same colour scheme. To do this I opened another member of my groups’ work next to mine and used the colour picker tool to select the exact same colours which they had used.
For the front and inside left pane I put a picture inside of a locket, however I did not want the whole of picture because it needed to fit into the shape of the locket to look realistic. To solve this problem I used the background eraser tool. To use this I simply had to click on the parts of the picture which I wanted to blend into the background colour.
I also found that the pictures inside of the locket were too bright and did not fit in with the feel of the digipak. After experimenting with different effects on the pictures I settled on (name of effect) and adjusted the saturation and amount of pixels.
Premier
This year we used Premier elements 9.0 to edit our music video. We used several different post production editing techniques which were vital in making it look like a professional piece of work. An important tool which I used was the time stretch tool, to use this you simply had to select the tool and then stretch or shorten the clip by siding the end of it either left or right. This allowed us to speed up clips such as the performance shots of Bruno Mars. He had originally sung the lyrics too slowly so that the lip syncing was out of time, but with this tool we were able to fix it. We were also able to lengthen out clips, into slow motion, such as the leaves being thrown into the air, which gave it a dreamy and romantic feel.
I also used image control to up the saturation on the narrative shots so that they seemed brighter and livelier, especially in comparison to the performance shots. The performance shots were also edited in black and white to give it a stark contrast to the bright colours of the narrative which it cut into.
To make it seem as if there was more camera movement in the performance shots we used the earthquake tool to shake the screen slightly. However, it was important not to put the earthquake settings too high or it looks to obviously shaky.
We also used a transition effect called a cross fade between our performance and narrative shots, this meant that the transition between shots was smoother. It also meant that by moving the key frames we could have Bruno Mars’ face singing in the foreground of a performance shot which looked very effective. Although we did have problems with this, if the placement of the key frames were too drastically different from one another then the white balance would change meaning the image of Bruno Mars would go from very bright to very dark.
We also needed to make sure that the images’ opacity level was the same on these cross fades, we did this by selecting copy on the edited clips then right clicking on a unedited clip and selecting paste attributes, this was a lot quicker than editing each clip individually. If the opacity had been too low it would make him look like s ghostly figure which is not the romantic look we wanted.
Cameras
The HD cameras were easy to use for the majority of filming and the shots were of a good quality when we uploaded them to premier, however we did have a few problems with them.
It is nearly impossible to shoot at night with these cameras as they need a decent mount of lighting in order to pick up anything in the shot. Being winter it meant that it got dark very quickly so we needed to plan well ahead of our shoots so we could get all of the footage we needed well before it started to get dark.
The cameras also have a zoom button, however this is not very useful because it looks jerky and tacky. This meant that we had to shoot several of our shots from different lengths away to get the shot we originally hoped for.
Evaluation
We again used web 2.0 for our evaluation by putting a group of closed questions onto another questionnaire on survey monkey. This is also being circulated on Facebook so that people of the teenage age group can answer and we can compare them on survey monkey as you can see the amount of different responses and these can easily be transferred into graphs and charts.
