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

Magazine Article Drafts

Once i created my first magazine draft, I used it to get feedback off my focus group and teacher. These improvements were mentioned:

• Make the image bigger
• Change the font to the same as digipak
• Make the title size bigger
• The layout of the text doesn't look good
• Font and colour of text needs changing
• Doesn't suit your theme well

Magazine Article -  

Digipak First Edit

I began by making my front panel, side inner CD and back panel. After, I asked my focus group on their feedback for my digipak as well as my teacher. 

What needed improving:

• Front panel colors should be the same as the rest of the digipak
• There needs to be the same font and size of writing
• The image on the front panel should be bigger 
• Text on the front pane, side panel and back panel should be moved 
• CD panel is too plain
• No capitals on the side panel - makes it harder to read 
• The inner panel looks boring. 

Front Panel - 

 

Side panel - 

 Inner panel - 

CD -

Back panel -

Reshoot Day (Friday 12th January)

As mentioned in my previous vlog, i went to reshoot on Friday. The day went to plan and everything went smoothly. I re-shot every shot twice and made sure to play them back to see how they had turned out. The reshooting did not take long as i had a clear plan of what i was going to be doing and therefore it took approx 1 hour in total to get all the shots i needed. That evening, i went through my footage and the shakiness had improved immensely from what i originally had. In conclusion, i had a successful day!

Music Video Promo - Shakiness

After watching my music video and getting focus group feedback, I have found that most of my walking shots are very shaky. Therefore i tried using a stabilizer in my editing to try and fix this however because there is so much shakiness, i will have to re shoot my scenes. I will make a clear plan of what i will be re shooting, for example all the shaky scenes which consist of establishing shot and walking shots of my actor. To prevent this from happening, i will be using a stabilizer on the camera so its easier to walk with. I will re shoot each shot at least twice for a backup. This means i will need to communicate with my actor and plan for a day to go down to Eton and re-film. This should not take me long as i will know exactly what i am doing.  The effect of this shakiness makes the video quality look poor and therefore to achieve a good grade i will need to change this.

 This is the stabilizer i will be using!

Editing Journal

I used the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to edit my music video.  The editing process took longer than I thought however, it went well and having an understanding and using the software before made the process easier. As i was not able to have this software available at home, i made sure to use all my free periods in order to get the editing done to the best of my ability. Each day consisted of an hour of editing.




Day 1 - 
I started off by adding in all my clips onto the software. This roughly took me an hour to get the right clips i needed as i had shot each scene twice therefore i had to pick the best one. After this, i began by ordering my clips into the right order. This was quite a straightforward task and it was manageable and easy. However this took me time to do as i had to make sure i got the order correct from my storyboard and picking the right clips that fit each section mattered in order for the video to flow properly. 

Day 2- 
This day consisted of cutting my clips down to the right size that is needed. Then i began adding in transitions in between each clip to make them flow easier. i used a cut transition in between all the clips which is simple but went well with my video as well as the flow was smooth. i did this by placing the clips side by side to create this transition.This day went very well and was very productive as my ordering and transitions had been completed.

 

 Day 3 -
Day 3 of editing went well however it could of gone better. This is due to my music video taking a long time to render which did waste a lot of time however to get over this i now know to render every now and then so it does not take long. On this day, i began by adding an colour balance in to change my video into a black and white effect. I also cropped my video with systematic black bars to make it look like a music video. 

Day 4 - 
By now i had quite a lot of my editing completed, however i was unaware of the stability of the promo video until i had shown my focus group and therefore i had to fix this. Before thinking about this i finished my editing by adding in slow motion effects such as the clips where my actor is walking up and down the streets. I used a slow motion effect here so the clip fitted the music flow as well. After this, i got my teachers feedback on my music video and this is when she told me that my video was very shaky. At first, I began using a stabilizer tool on the software to stabilize my clips so they didn't shake to much, however this did not cause all of it to go away and therefore i was made to re shoot my scenes again.

Day 5- 
After completing all my re shooting, i began to put my clips together again and completed all the editing i did on my previous scenes to my new ones, for instance, adding the same transition and effects. Finally, this is when i was confident enough to have finished my editing stage and i was happy with my promo. I then decided to show my teacher and focus group for some feedback. 

What went well -
I think the transition effects and the time frames went really well with the music production and the flow was good. Everything was on time and the transition effects went well with the music video as well. 

What did not go so well -
The stabilizer is used whilst editing did not really work how i wanted it too and therefore this resulted me in re shooting my video however i was happy to have done it as it made my video look better in different ways as well. 

Improvements for next time- 
If i was to redo the editing stage, i would make sure that i had a clear idea of what i was doing in each of my editing lessons and made it realistic so it was easy to go by. Other than that i think the editing process went well and i am happy with my final promo video.

Drafted Digipak and Magazine Idea

Before i begin on my ancillary, i did a photo shoot with my actor and decided to play around with the pictures and layout on power-point, so i knew the exact lay out i was going to use. From my final  ideas, i have still used the same layout however i decided to redraft again with my final photos. 

 This is my final Magazine article.


This is my redrafted design for my digipak.