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

I feel that filming and editing this video storyboard in preparation of the actual narrative shoot was incredibly helpful in the production stage. This type of "hands on" research & planning is appropriate for my way of working and since I was director and cameraman for this sequence, it allowed me to be more time efficient on the day in terms of shooting the footage and arranging my actors as required. We used Web 2.0, a vast new media technology to advertise the video with the target audience on the social networking site, Facebook to then view the video and post feedback either on the post on Facebook itself or on the YouTube link.  This method of advertising requires minimal budget (it's free!) and it has potentially a global reach with no wastage. Another media student and avid social networker Charley Packham (who also played the teacher in our music video and 'Cassie' as part of our band !nflux) posted the video on Michael's wall on Facebook, and tagged Adam and I in the post.

Web 2.0 not only allowed me to get audience feedback on my research & planning stage, but it has also been resourceful in the evaluation stages too. In evaluation question 3, I gained the feedback through Facebook because this platform is easily accessible by the majority of the target audience. In AS media, when studying audiences in the film industry I came across a statistic saying that 96% of 16-24 year olds both male and female use social networking sites at least once a day. This fact let me understand that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were certainly a viable option of maximising reach for advertising.


Also, I did much of my evaluation on my Blackberry mobile phone because that meant I was able to note down points as and when I thought of them, I was able to use my time commuting more productively and it meant that when a new point was raised by someone else perhaps to do with audience feedback or a general point about the layout of my evaluation questions I was able to write this down.

NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN EDITING

During post-production using new media technologies enhanced my final product significantly. I used CS5 Adobe Premier Pro to edit the music video and this state-of-the-art editing software allowed me to experiment with all kinds of special effects and brought me to the end product. Effects I believe particularly stand out are:

-Spherise- This allowed me to create visual bass feel by creating a "fish eye-like" effect on the beat in a couple phrases of the track. It is most effective where it is used in the first drop when I used in combination with the colour grading. When individuals saw this effect they were instantly amazed saying how "creative" and "unique" it was, with the overall reaction being "wow!"

-RGB curves- this is an effect used in colour grading to enhance or simply change the colour to whatever you like. The reason I prefer this tool to the other variations of colour grading effects is that you can control the removal or addition of colours with ease. I love the range of colour grading effects that you can produce using this tool because it adds a unique flare to my editing, something which I am proud of.

-Slo-mo- Heavy use of slo-mo is a convention of dubstep videos so I knew that having researched videos like 'Feel Good' by Modestep and the Bar 9 remix of Example's 'Kickstarts' it would be foolish to not include it. However, I and the rest of my group felt that these videos overused slo-mo and so we wanted to challenge this convention. The feedback received over this has been varied with a few people saying "there should have been more slo-mo", but the majority saying they "liked the specific slo-mo shots because they weren't overused."

          Slo-mo jumpshot sequence.


To conclude, without the new media technologies like Web 2.0 and the Blackberry mobile phone communication with the audience and my other group members would have been much more difficult and without the editing capabilities of CS5 Adobe Premier Pro this project wouldn't have come together at all.