Gemma Malcolm A2 Coursework

Today I have completed everything which is needed for my A2 coursework - I have finally completed my music video, digipak and magazine advert as well as my evaluation questions. After spending many hours creating the planning and drafting tasks I have finally completed all the needed tasks! I can confidently say I can use Adobe Indesign as well as Premiere, prezi, youtube, voki and vimeo. For me personally the biggest achievement was creating my music video, throughout the process I was faced with several issues, such as my footage being lost and having bad footage but after overcoming all the issues I created a music video which I am proud off and want to show people - I am also impressed by the way I motivated myself to complete all the tasks to get the grade I wanted.

The thing I most enjoyed about the project was watching and hearing peoples responses to my music video, some who understand the concept and other who needed to watch it again to understand the narrative! However the overall response was positive and everyone was very complimentary about my music video which made me extremely proud. Claudia Dyer my artist was the main person I wanted to thank from this experience as without her excellent performance skills I wouldn’t of created or completed this task.

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

In order to create the tasks needed, technology was vital in order of producing these. At the start of the year we was required to create a blog website – www.blogger.com, I was already familiar with this site due to the AS media studies course. The blog is used to post all of our work which we produce for the course, from the planning stages to drafting, research and evaluations. To ensure our blog is kept multi modal I included a variety of different software’s, therefore I included different functions of prezis, post videos, scribd documents and voki. I did also include PowerPoint’s and word documents within my blog posts but I found websites such as prezi were much more interactive and amusing to use, due to the factor it allows you to lay out your work in abstract and unique ways which appears more interesting.

As a blog is meant to be a discussion of the development of your work, when I felt I had produced a piece of excellent work or made a big improvement I would make a production diary post, this was just me writing some words about these improvements, although it may not appear as attractive as the other forms of media I felt it got right to the point about what I had developed and addresses the examiner so he understands what my thoughts are based on the work.

Using the internet for my work was essential, this allowed me to research into my task to develop my knowledge of the music industry and what is required from a music video through the audiences view. The search engine Google allowed me to access a large amount of information; this required me looking into artists, genre, narrative and audiences opinions. Without this I wouldn’t of been able to research similar products of music videos, existing Digipaks and album magazine adverts. It was also essential that I contacted artists/record labels for permission to use their song title - therefore the internet really came in hand when constructing my tasks.

Developing, to shoot my music video I was required to use a Cannon SLR 600D, the aim of this was to have a high quality music video which appears professional due to the camera which I decided to use. Developing from AS I changed the settings on the camera which allowed me to the use the manual setting in comparison to the automatic, this showed a developed in my skills through the use of technology. Due to the change in locations the settings had to be edited to fit the scenery, due to this some scenes were filmed inside, in a studio and outside and therefore each scene would appear different due to the camera settings, therefore I changed the settings to ISO which captured the scenes in same high quality and still increased the visibility of the artist Claudia. Also, I used a prime aperture lens of 1.8mm in these conditions as it is more suitable to lower levels of light. To create added effect when making my music video I increased the lighting on the software - Adobe Premiere to gain an increased visual effects. The shutter speed was 1/50 alongside with the ISO setting on 200-600 so that I avoided having a grainy footage but gave me a more HD look, the advantage of using digital cameras rather than a film camera is that you can spontaneously make decisions straight after taking an image or footage by renewing it.

In terms of constructing my music video I used the software Adobe Premier to edit and put together the footage filmed. Although this was my first time using this software I got to know how it works very well, although some editing took practice and meant I had to watch tutorials online to gain the knowledge to put it together correctly. At first it seemed like a difficult challenge, although due to the use of software it provided a range of functions and effects which can be used during the editing process which made it much easier and quicker to complete.

Highlighting on my ancillary tasks I created my magazine advert and digipak on Adobe Indesign, this software was a lot easier to use as I was already familiar with the tools and features which are featured within the software. Once creating the magazine advert I was able to drag the same fonts and images to my digipak to keep the same house style throughout, it also meant I could create it a lot quicker and easier. Using these software’s has become beneficial to me as I have been able to work with professional software which industry’s above me use.