Evaluation - Media Technologies

Evaluation - Media Technologies

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

     Construction

How lighting was constructed at certain points:

The editing process was finally completed on 16th March 2017, over 3 months after the start of filming. The editing was a long, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. The timeline below looks relatively simple and light, which reflects the simplicity of the video: unlike a short film, there was no audio to worry about, besides the music, which made editing much easier.

The narrative is also straight forward, and there are no complex scenes which required easy access to a lot of footage during the edit - that would have made the timeline look busier with a lot more layers. Because all the scenes are really brief, the video has a very quick pace. This also made the video easier to edit.

Sam took the most control during the editing because he was the most confident with Final Cut Pro X and had the most editing experience. He disliked using Final Cut Pro X, as he found the interface difficult to do precise edits in, and was still not used to the magnetic timeline feature. However, it was also a very collaborative experience because every week we would watch the whole video through as a group and make comments about things we wanted to change. These changes were generally minor, such as reordering some of the shots earlier in the film to clarify the order of events.

Another change we made was speeding up the footage of the silhouetted hand turning the pocket watch. We did this because the pacing was too slow, and it detracted from the flow of the video. Thankfully, it is not very noticeable. The more substantial changes were to do with visual effects. Sam used Triune Digital's Fire Assets inside Final Cut Pro X to enhance the live action fire. Below is a VFX breakdown on some of the shots he added CG fire elements to (although only 3 shots are in the video below, he added some form of CG fire to 90% of the fire shots, mostly digital embers).

For the digipak, I hand-drew the drawing of the heart and the veins coming from it. Sam then scanned it to his computer at home with a scanner, imported it into Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 (which he is more confident on than Photoshop) and digitally coloured the scanner heart using a Wacom graphic tablet. Digital colouring gave us much more flexibility than colouring it on paper, as he could finely adjust the tint, saturation and opacity of the colours. Our original re-touched design was too saturated, so Sam desaturated the colours and dropped their opacity from 100% to around 60%. This gave it a more watercolour look which we liked.

Sam was also able to resize the heart elements on the computer. We thought the core of the heart was too large in relation to the small parts, so Sam made the core smaller so it would be better proportioned. This would have been very difficult to do on paper, as it would have required re-drawing the whole thing again, or using scissors and glue.

We uploaded the final video on 22nd March, and promoted it on our own social media pages, such as Facebook and Instagram.

     Research

We used google to research other indie bands to widen our knowledge and broaden our horizons. YouTube was instrumental in helping us discover our tone and direction as it helped us understand more about the conventions of indie music. Blogger was utilized so we could keep a record of our processes and consolidate our progress.

Sam used a camera (Canon 600D) and editing software (Sony Vegas) to create lens tests where he tested a combination of lenses and filters so we could really nail the visual style of the video. See the video below:

     Planning

To ensure that we kept lines of communication open, we created a Facebook messenger chat, an Instagram chat, a WhatsApp chat, and exchanged phone numbers so we were all able to contact each other in many different ways. We would upload draft versions of edits or digipak designs to group chats, and we were able to instantly feedback and discuss. This made it much easier to keep on top of tasks and make sure we all knew what we were doing and could contact each other if we ever needed help.

     Evaluation

In our evaluation, we used a wide range of media technologies. We used two videos, one was a group commentary on the final video, and one was the evaluation of all the equipment used in filming (at the top if this post). We also put everything on blogger, using pictures from the internet and screenshots from YouTube to back up our points.

I also learnt how to make Prezi's, a presentation system I had never used before. At first I found the layout hard to understand, but as I grew more used to it my confidence increased. As well as this I also had to screenshot videos and save images to illustrate my points, and crop and resize pictures and text to make them more suitable for presenting.