1. In what ways does your media products use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
2. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
3. What have you learned from your audience feedback?
4. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
During the production of our project, we used many examples of new media technologies. For instance: video camera; Nikon and Canon stills camera; Tripod; Dell computer; computer programmes (including Adobe Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop and Windows Paint). If any of these technologies were not available to us or were less developed we would not have been able to create our project to as high a standard as we have. If these technologies were not as advenced as they are our production process would have been very different and be made much more difficult. For example:
- We would have had to have used an old editing style known as "crash editing". This process involves cutting and sticking from several reems of tape in order to create the cuts we need. This would have been much more difficult as we could not have made any mistakes or experimented with the placement of different shots.
- There could be no effects throughout the video, such as cross fades or colour editing. If this were the case it would have been difficult to create significance of certain scenes, objects and characters. For example, we would have put "past" scenes in black and white in order to distinguish them from scenes from the "present", as this is universal connotations that link to memories.
- The internet played a very important part in our research techniques, as search engines like google.co.uk have allowed us to quickly search for album covers that link to our chosen genre. It has also helped us to gain information on record companies, such as Universal and ATM. We used social networking site MySpace to ask our artist permission to use her material. If this wasn't available to us we would have had to risk legal action, due to copyright laws and playback issues. Video sharing site YouTube.com has also played a very important role in our research towards our music video. We were able to watch current and old music videos in order gain ideas and knowledge about the plot and structure of our video and the conventions related to our chosen genre.
YouTube was used to watch other music videos and gain ideas for plots, styles of film (including pace and camera movement) etc.