JB: Q4 – How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Q4 – How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

We used blogger.com as a collaborative e-portfolio in our group throughout the construction, planning and evaluation. For example, we assigned different tasks and work around the group in order to cope with the quantity of work demanded. This was a useful technique in co-ordination because a we each had a Gmail account, we could all access the blog and posts we did would be titled under each of our names to show clearly who was doing which pieces of work which worked well in a strategic and team based formulae.

 TO carry out audience research we used Survey Monkey to help decipher what our target audience actually wanted to see in our production and was also helpful in portraying a vivid image of genre conventions and themes and work associated with our particular genre. This was most useful because, although we already had quite a good understanding of the UK hip-hop artist Loyle Carner, we managed to get many responses which altered and adapted our understanding of the British rapper’s meta-narrative. For example, a large percentage of our target audience interpreting Loyle Carners song –Mufasa of having perhaps a more solemn and sombre representation, whereas we had previously determined it as a happy song. Once we looked into the lyrics and meaning of these we in fact became more agreed on the opinion that the song did in fact hold a more reserved and saddening undertone to which we had first missed. SurveyMonkey was helpful in determining this because it filed the information’s quickly and easily into graphs which were easily read and organized to give an accurate and visual representation of our target audiences interests and beliefs. This therefore had an impact on our planning and construction as we had to begin re working and re thinking our concept due to the realised mood of the song, SurveyMonkey was helpful in doing this, however, as it helped us come to the realisation that perhaps our initial ideas were not fully accurate and the feedback the survey site enabled us to retain was helpful in giving us that second opinion that in hindsight we did need.

This is an example of a use how we Web 2.0 allowed us to really pick out a target audience and then attempt to penetrate the audience by creating an audience portfolio of what we would expect them to like. We were enabled to do this by using email to send our questionnaire of which we produced on SuveyMonkey to variety of different demographics and psychographics to gain an all rounded representation of the artists perceived metanarrative. We found the use of Web 2.0 a large part of the planning and research angle of our production, as for us, the internet was a big part of how we were initially introduced to the artist and therefore we knew that there was much more that web 2.0 could offer us in terms of understanding the artist had to offer. This was true as we researched the artists past and life, to which we established his Father had died when he was very young and that this influenced the family and united side of his music, which again we transferred into the construction of our production where we themed our music video around losing a loved one, which we felt the track suited very well.

 Using DaVinci Resolve, we constructed an animatic by physically drawing all the stages of scenes and angles of shots we wanted to use. We created about 30 individual frames and then used a camera to film the length of each shot, with this we tried to be relatively accurate as we knew it would benefit us in the construction of the film as it would mean we would have a more thorough and insightful idea of how much footage we have and need. After we had this clip, we arranged the frame in the order we wanted them to be in and shot them on a camera, this was helpful as it essentially created a real and physical form of our music video which enabled us to watch the video back with the music and decide if there were any obvious parts which didn’t fit or if there were any obvious parts which we needed to get, it also helped us decide the anchor points of the video as such. Placing the animatic with the music it made it clear which aspects of the song would be the climax’s and therefore we would need to align these with correspondingly strong visuals.

 When shooting we used a HD camera, a multitude of equipment like the track and dolly and the Jib to exhibit professional looking footage through a variety of tried and tested camera techniques.