New media technologies completely enveloped our project; very little of what we managed to achieve could have been made possible without the use of new technologies and advancements in Web 2.0.
Research and Planning
WEB 2.0
Before even proposing and song and video idea, we needed to gather information and inspiration from the huge array of videos now available online, through services such as YouTube and GoogleVideo.
VEVO: an example of a YouTube channel which offers hundreds of music videos
YouTube also has a feature which allows you to view the statistics of the video, detailing which age demographic has watched it the most, in which territories it is most popular, and also from where viewers had been directed to the video (Facebook, TV advert etc.)
This proved to be useful whilst examining a target audience in relation to genre. Finally, YouTube is a medium to share our finished videos, and receive feedback.
Facebook has proved to be an invaluable tool throughout the entire project, and is a massively upcoming social medium of the past few years. For research and planning purposes it made arranging group meetings and contacting actors very easy. We could also stay in regular contact online for small progress updates and detailing tasks which needed to be done. Also, researching in to already existing band's Facebook pages for inspiration was made easy.For construction, we have made a Facebook page for our band, which we then linked to our band website.
The new Google Maps Street View service allowed for easy location scouting. We would draw up a shortlist of locations for specific sections which needed shooting, then could narrow down the possibilities easily using Google Street View. This was wonderfully useful to our project: we travelled to many different locations to shoot and this saved lots of unnecessary journeys.
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| Google Street View |
Construction
Equipment
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| The Canon 550d, which we used to film our video |
Using new HD cameras was very beneficial to our project as we got to produce a film in fantastic quality; the camera's also allowed us to successfully capture our scenes with the UV lighting, which would have been near impossible with an inferior camera.
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| Capturing this footage would have been impossible without new media technologies at our disposal |
Premier Pro
This was the software we used to edit together our footage. It has been hugely useful to our project and has allowed to edit with complete precision.
It also let us do some clever effects with Eva, such as the shots where she dissapears.
Here is a screencap from Premier Pro:
We used Premier Pro to edit our track. The brief stated that our video must be 3 minutes or less, and our track selection was 4 minutes 30 seconds; even though Premier Pro is primarily for editing video, it worked brilliantly for cutting down and marginally speeding up our track, so it was under 3 minutes long.
We also used Premier Pro to create a promo montage-style video for the screening of all our music videos.
Photoshop
Photoshop was used heavily throughout the construction of our video, website and album cover. The album cover template itself was presented to us in a photoshop (.psd) format, making it the essential software to use for stills editing and graphics.
We created our main band logo on Photoshop:
After making this logo the blue and black colour scheme became consistent to our branding; as did the font of our name. The smokey effect round the letters was achieved through Photoshop and was also a motif we used across our album cover and website.
See here our album cover, which was entirely constructed in Photoshop.
We used Photoshop to edit promo pictures of the band, which were then used on our album cover and website. It helped us change the tints of pictures and put effects on them which suited our cold and metallic colour scheme.
The top shot is after the editing, the bottom is beforehand.
We used Photoshop to create a poster for an event with our band and another groups band together. We thought this was a good example of synergy, and could be made possible by Photoshop.
COLOUR
Colour was the software on the Mac which we used to colour grade our video.
Here is a short video, narrated by Eoin, which explains some of it's uses and applications with regards to our footage.
WEB 2.0
WIX.COM
Wix.com was the website we used to make our website. It is a flash based online website designer. We were the first year in our school to get to use this software, and it proved to be a fantastic way to integrate our website in with the rest of our project.
You can embed videos, pictures, hyperlinks and sound files in to your website through Wix, and it allows for high levels of visual customisation, with many buttons, effects and features available.
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| Wix's Interface is clean and well designed |
It allowed us to embed our music video on the 'Video' page of our website, as well as have our track selection playing when the user first arrives on the website.
The level of customisation available also allowed us to keep our branding consistent throughout all our texts. Starting with the original black and blue scheme on our album cover, we could use this throughout the website and also include smokey graphics and our band logo.
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| Our websites main page, which keeps in theme with our branding |
It also allows for high levels of audience interaction: pages can be commented on, you can enter a competition and sign up to our bands mailing list.
Simply having the ability to make a website at all (using Wix or not) greatly increases audience interaction with the band. As well as those ways already stated, users can view a whole array of photos from our band photo shoot, learn about and purchase tickets for upcoming gigs and view individual member bio's.
We also made a Twitter page for our band, which we then linked to our website.
Evaluation
I have already discussed how we used Web 2.0 in our evaluation; YouTube and Facebook for posting our video and receiving feedback; and the YouTube video statistics will prove interesting later on after some views have (hopefully) amassed, we will be able to see if our video is watched by the demographic for which it was intended.
Using Facebook, we also made an event for our screening, which helped to promote it.
And finally, arguably the most important new media technology we have used:
BLOGGER!
We have used Blogger across all areas of the project; it is how we present all of our work and research findings to our teachers and examinator and the overall framework of our project.
All along the way, we have used blog posts on both our individual and group blogs to log progress and to present our portfolio.
In research and planning, we posted any initial ideas, video inspiration, any other sources of inspiration, deconstructions of bands websites, sketches, location ideas, or simply diary progress notes on blogger. It is a fantastic medium for which to amass a large quantity of visually exciting research and necessary planning. I can't imagine how this would have been possible with a pen and paper! Using Blogger meant we could constantly update the blog from multiple different locations, and continue to improve upon and tweak previous work with ease. Links to our teachers blogs also made finding extra resources and tips very easy.
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| Posting on Blogger |
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| Blogger: displaying all our work on one web page |
For the evaluation, blogger was how we presented our answers to the questions. Blogger is the staple of our whole portfolio!
Overall, new media technologies have been absolutely crucial to the success of our project. While, arguably, we could have pulled this off without any of these advancements; the quality of all areas of our project would have suffered dramatically.
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