Welcome to my blog, I am working towards producing a music video accompanied by ancillary texts for the track It's OK by Atomic Kitten
OUR TRACK: Atomic Kitten It's OK

Sunday 23 March 2014

Evaluation question 4 - Technologies

Q4: How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Further in this post additional videos are embedded to help support and add additional information. 'Pussycat Dolls 'When I grow Up - Creative arts evening' and 'Testing QR code'. 


QR Code and Viral Vid

Viral Vid
For the original track we chose to do for our coursework ('When I Grow Up' by The Pussycat Dolls), we made a viral video to try and increase and improve our audience interaction. Here is the promotional video that we made:





Us choreographing a dance routine for the PCD video

The viral video idea was based on the dance we created ourselves for the music video.. The concept of it was for fans to send in their clups of themselves doing the dance we were demonstrating in the video. Another idea was to get them to send in videos of themselves singing to the song. This helped give the fans ideas about creating more user-generated, something we really wanted to encourage as it helps the promotion of  a video, as it gets more people talking about it and it is a fun way to involve the fans.

User generated content helps reflect how we have shown the theory of Web 2.0 in our work. This theory states that the web is increasingly becoming user-generated as audiences can now easily contribute to the production of texts as a result of digitisation.
By getting fans to send in their clips of them dancing allows all of our target audiences to become involved, particularly our primary target audience and it also encourages them to listen to other Pussycat Dolls tracks. The clips sent in could be done in a comical or serious way, again increasing the amount of people who would want to be involved. 

Although we didn't apply the viral video concept for 'It's OK - Atomic Kitten', we still feel that by initially doing this, we have added to the audience interaction element of our production as a whole. It has intrigued our target audiences and made them interested in our videos and this may have made them want to continue to follow our production groups work, regardless of us changing direction.  This is important as it creates a connection and relationship between the audience and ourselves, and so it makes them feel as though they have a say, and can easily influence our decisions. To create this, we have increased our use of technology by making these extra videos on Final Cut Pro X, whilst also nicely linking the 3 texts together. If the video interests and involves the audience, then they will be more likely to want to research our production to discover more about the viral video and to enjoy our digipak and mag ads, as well as learning about how we have progressed and the stages at which we're at.

QR Code
our QR code
For our teaser and normal mag ads and digipak we displayed a QR code linking to our twitter page. We did this in our teaser mag ads to anchor the narrative enigma of having no writing on the mag ad and helping promote the girl group. For our mag ads and digipak it's a quick and interactive way of connecting people straight to our social media so they can see more of our projects and how it is developing. We also used twitter as a way of getting audience feedback, so by displaying the QR code on a poster the people being linked to our audience feedback are likely to be genuinely interested in our work and will give us contructive feedback.

our twitter page




This is a short video demonstrating that our QR code works by testing it. I simply scan it on my phone and it immediately gives me the option to open our twitter page. This was quick and simple and any one with a smart phone is able to do it, making it applicable to a large audience.       







The theorist Tim O'Reilly created the term web 2.0, which describes the interactive way in which the web works, and how it has developed from traditionally only being a platform for the publishers content. Other theorists such as David Gauntlett and Dan Gillmor call this 'the end of audience' and 'the former audience', saying that the divide between audience and producer is blurring, due to what Henry Jenkins described as convergence. Jenkins also discusses this shift to a 'participatory culture', and that we tried to reflect and project this thinking through using a QR code and our viral campaign. As well as the viral vid, our company twitter invited our fans to replicate and send in their efforts to share with other fans. Brigid Cherry wrote about how the internet has enabled these fan communities to enhance official releases and exhibit their own creations, and this is now known as 'user-generated content' or fan-made videos. We really wanted to push this idea and the excitement that comes with a fan community as well as promoting our material.

Research and Planning

Blogger
To display our research, planning and development we used the website blogger to create a blog, to then upload posts displaying this progression. Blogger can be used to embed videos, audio and images, making it very interactive along side our text and a great way of visually representing our ideas and research. Blogger is also very user friendly as we were able to easily link other websites and by creating links lists it makes the blog dynamic and simple to use and search. The tools to change the layout are straight forward and simple, as well as creating a text post, which merely takes seconds to do. The website blogger reflects the concept of Web 2.0 as it really helps the user collaborate and interact, this is interaction is displayed directly through the comment section on the website, which can give us instant feedback and constructive criticism on our work. As it is a blog we create ourselves it is completely user generated, and we can display to our target audience exactly what we want to be seen. We also used other blogs for research purposes as they are so easily accessible.

YouTube 
Throughout our research and planning we used YouTube in a number of different ways. We used it to upload rough cuts, sample footage and vodcasts, which we can then embed straight to our blogs. YouTube is also very useful for research, especially music videos and their conventions as well as the past videos from our artist. As it is such a vast website it is likely to have video content for whatever you are looking for, making it useful for a large proportion of people which people are now depending on. Again this in an interactive website, with an active comment section creating another opportunity for audience feedback. 

Divshare
Divshare is a website used for uploading files online so it is in the right format to be used and presented online. We found this website very useful as we can then embed the documents we uploaded onto Divshare directly to our blogs. It can be used for audio, word documents, images, videos and many other kinds of document, but we specifically used it for audio and word documents. The way the final effect looks on blogger is neat and professional. It isn't overcomplicated and is easy to use on blogger, however we found the uploading process onto Divshare can be more difficult for audio documents in particular so often we opted to use a website called podomatic instead.

Podomatic 
We used podomatic to upload our weekly podcasts to our blogs. Podomatic works very similarly to Divshare, but as it is specific to podcasts and audio it's uploading is much simpler for the user to understand. By having podcasts on our blog adds a different way to update our audience rather than just boring text to be read. This helps us keep the blog interesting to anyone viewing it and also allows the relationship between us creating the blog and the audience to seem more personal as it gives the impression we are directly talking to them about our updates and ideas and makes them feel more involved in the development. 

Fan forums and websites
We used fan forums and websites to further research our artist and their fan base. From this we learnt exactly what the audience want and how they like the band to be portrayed. We also used these fan forums to display rough cuts and any ideas we have. This is very useful to us as we get feedback direct from out target audience and from people we really know care about how atomic kitten are portrayed  and the success of our video for that band. Websites such as fan pop, allow you to search a band and then see every fan profile created on the website. There are also specific fan forum sites for atomic kitten with an active comment system for us to post ideas, links and videos for feedback. 

Gmail
We used gmail for two main reasons in our research  and planning. We used it for contacting the record label to ask for rights to use the audio of their track in the video. We also used it as for contacting our cast in a professional and direct way. Gmail is also connected to our google account, and as blogger is owned by the conglomerate google, these websites being connected meant 1 simple account could be used throughout the research and planning process.


Facebook 
To contact and talk amongst our production group we used the social networking site Facebook. We only used Facebook to communicate through the production group as we felt it would be too unprofessional to contact cast in this way. 

Instagram 
We used Instagram as a way of posting pictures and updating people on our progress. Again this is a very interactive website as you are able to like a comment on pictures, hopefully expanding our target audience and the people interested in following our progress. We have posted pictures of us editing and behind the scenes of filming. You Can also add tags to the pictures, making them easier to find when searching in general. By posting teaser pictures of our work we are also building up the audience for the expected release of the video. Instagram is a good way of keeping the fan base always connected to our progress as Instagram is constantly used globally and a very popular app. 

Twitter 
Twitter is a social networking website which we found useful when getting audience feedback and promoting our production company. By writing short tweets we can quickly get messages out and add tags to our work, making us easier to find and track. 







Magazine websites 
We used magazine websites to search for previous magazine ads that atomic kitten had had and to research the type of publishers we would want our magazine ad to be in, such as teen magazines like now and look. We also searched the publication website for figures of their sales to certain ages to help anchor the audiences that they mostly have to make sure we choose the right publications for the audience that ad is trying to grab the attention of. 


Construction and Exhibition

HD camera 
To film our music video and to take pictures for our magazine and digipak we used an HD camera. We used the canon LEGRIA HF R36. We used an HD camera to get the best quality footage possible. A lot of HD cameras are reasonably priced, making them accessible to a wide range of people than previous technology would have allowed before digitisation. 

USBs and HD cards 
We USBs to transfer work from our home computers the ones which we edit on at school. We used a 32Gb one to ensure we had the maximum amount of storage necessary. We used am SD card to Save the footage from the camera instead of using the inbuilt memory. We did this to make the process of moving the footage to the editing software much simpler and quicker. 

Final Cut Pro x
The editing software Final Cut Pro x has a huge range of effects and editing tools to make our video look as professional and effective as possible. We used a range of these effects, especially basic tools such as blade yet also more complicate techniques such as layering. From lighting to cropping Final Cut Pro is very good software and that's why a lot of big film makers are starting to use this. We have been using final cut for 2 years now, and over this time our skills have really developed and we are now pretty knowledgable on the main tools. However, as final cut pro is such vast software we often came across techniques we wanted to achieve but didn't know how. To over come this we googled and searched on YouTube as a lot of final cut experts post videos and help blogs about how to work simple and much more difficult effects.

Adobe Photoshop
We used adobe photoshop when creating our Digipak and Magazine Advertisements. As adobe is very professional software I struggled to use and understand it and the amount of tools I used was quite limited compared to the vast things adobe can help you create. Through searching the internet and asking more knowledgeable class mates I slowely learnt how to use it more effectively and edit pictures effectively adding text, layering and effects to a good standard, however I would still not say that it is easy software to understand and it takes time to learn to use it if you are completely new to it.

YouTube 
We again used YouTube in the production and exhibition part of our coursework. We displayed our videos her and uploaded them to blogger. You can also export videos on to YouTube straight from Final Cut Pro to YouTube, saving a lot of time. YouTube also has an extremely large demographic, and a large population of people frequently watch and upload it, this broadens are potential audience and feedback we may get.  The theorist John McMuria did analysis of content on YouTube and revealed that minorities were grossly under-represented and that the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube tend to be white middle class males. Because of this information, this is why we chose to also display our rough cuts on twitter and fan forums and websites, to make sure that our demographic was definitely being targeted. 


Evaluation 

Blogger 
Not only in the research, planning, production and exhibition, we also used blogger in the evaluation. We used it to find the previous research we have done, to help anchor the points we make in the evaluation questions. We also will post our evaluation to be presented on blogger, along with all our other work making our blogs represent everything we have done. 

Final Cut Pro 
We again used Final Cut Pro to edit our evaluation videos to make them look professional and to add clear titles and pictures and videos to anchor our points. Final Cut Pro has an in built audio record tool, making it very simple to record the voice over to our evaluation.

VLC Media Player
When making our evaluation videos we wanted to include short clips from our rough cuts and final cuts, especially to show any progression or things we have changed due to audience feedback. VLC became very useful for this as when viewing a video on this media player you can record small parts of this and it will become exported as a separate clip for us to then drop into final cut when editing all the visual examples and audio.

Screen Capture
Screen capture is a downloadable device making it extremely easy to screenshot your computer screen, or a particular region open on it. This was vital in the evaluation stage of our coursework as we needed to extensively back up the points we are making on our video and research. As we developed our research we took screenshots along the way so when it came to the evaluation we could use these screenshots to save a lot of time.








Prezi
To add an alternative visual element to our evaluation questions, we used the online presentation website 'Prezi'. This website allows you to create an interactive presentation, set out in a way which you choose, with as many points as you like. You can then create a path, which follows the text in a chronological order. Once you have created an account, you can create as many presentations as you wish, and they are relatively simple to navigate. We only used this website for a section in Question 1 however, as it can be fairly time consuming, and if there is too much text in one presentation, creating the presentation can become complicated. Despite this, it provided an extra technology for us to use which overall proved to work very well.

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