Question 4 Evaluation

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 us, blogger was a better option than WordPress as we were familiar with the format of Blogger from our AS production and therefore we had grown accustom to the use of the blogs on Blogspot. Therefore, our evaluation was that it would the risk outweighed the rewards because it would be very time consuming. 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. This was a quick and easy adaptation which connoted the current and postmodern benefits of Web 2.0, implying there is vast amounts of choice and demand throughout the resources of the internet.

 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. Overall, we found using SurveyMonkey self-explanatory and was always out first point of call when needing to create a questionnaire. We cumulatively had lots of experience on SurveyMonkey, myself especially, even since GCSE level, where we created surveys related to psychographics and demographics. 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, this shows the dilemmas of a negotiated reading from Stuart Halls Encoding/ Decoding. 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, this then thoroughly influenced out preferred reading through the uses of locations, in train stations which were meant to connote ‘time unwillingly passing’, and the bottle of beer, which was meant to connote ‘turning to the bottle due to depression’. 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. In my opinion, the most important piece of feedback from the surveys was the constructive criticism we were given. As we had studied the song for a long time, and almost knew the song word for word, we felt as if we knew the song inside out. This we thought would make it easier to apply a metanarrative and preferred reading to the storyline. However, some of the most important feedback we gained was that parts of the lines of action were confused, even though we thought they were completely clear! We came to the conclusion that while for us it was very clear, as we were working on it every day, a first time viewer would not have a clear understanding as, granted, it is a very focused viewing. As a result, we decided there was a distinct need for visual symbolisers that would help the syuzhet. As there were 3 intercutted parallel lines of action. We used signifiers such as costume in similar items of clothing, the dog, which was only used in the flashbacks and graveyard to create correlation.

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. It also made communicating in the groups easy and simple, through social media sites such as Facebook, where we had a group and Gmail accounts and google accounts which we all had. This we believe improved interconnectedness. 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. The jib enabled us to produce steady and professional shots. We had had some practice initially in Wilderness Woods, and in the AS production where we used quite a high quality camera in the Sony NX 300. This gave us some experience with camera which we attempted to carry though to A level. However, with this year not have access to the same camera which resulted in us using a school camera, meaning at the beginning it took a bit longer to get used to the equipment. We are most pleased with the montage of Oli sitting in front of the church because it works very effectively on the track, taking multiple different shots with Oli sitting in different places edited together on the beat of the song.  Personally, however, I am mostly proud of the flashback sequence which is produced myself in After Effects where I attempted to create a believable motion similar to that of a train, where the flashbacks, in turn came to life portraying memories and looking back at life. With this, inspiration was taken from ‘The Streets – Fit but you know it’. The cameras allow the focus to be changed it will giving us opportunities for pull focus shots, this works well with our track as it gives a sort of ambient feel especially when the focus is soft and slightly blurred. The use of the jib is also very useful, giving slow, smooth movements that are noticeable allowing camera movement, we used this is the graveyard scene to get the slow smooth movement linking closely to that of a graveyard.