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

When creating a music video, a lot of time and planning needs to go into it before it can be filmed. Costumes, scenes and the lyrics need to be assessed and evaluated before a story can be created.

Research into a music video is extremely important as it allows you to see already existing products that are successful. Looking at these videos will allow you to see what the directors did that was successful and what they did that wasn’t successful. It also allows you to see the codes and conventions that can be found in the genre.

YouTube is a key component to this research as it allowed me to see existing music videos which have been made for big time artists. It also allowed me to research into student made music videos in the same genre. This again allowed me to review and improve on the techniques used which made the music videos high quality. These are the music videos I researched into and used some of the conventions from when making my music video.

Whilst planning the music video, I used blogger which helped to keep track on all my research. It also allowed the group to see each other's ideas and it allowed us to combine our ideas and create a music video we were all a part of.







When constructing the music video, digipak and magazine advert rough ideas have to be drawn up and discussed between the group to decide what the video will look like in the end. The main points that need to be considered are scenes and lighting. I researched into different scenes from films and music videos to get an idea of the lighting and the mise en scene of those scenes. I found that in a more sinister film or music video the lighting is a lot darker and more naturalistic, whereas in a more cheery music video or film the scenes use more artificial lighting to create a more peaceful feel to the video. 
In our music video we used naturalistic lighting for our performance shots and darker artificial lighting for the narrative shots to show the contrast between the two scenes. The darker lighting in the music video gave connotations of the danger and death that would soon ensue. 
For filming we used a Sony HD camera and a tripod. The camera gave us a high quality picture which we could then adjust accordingly on iMovie, which is the editing programme we used to finalize our project. iMovie was extremely easy to use as it allowed us to easily cut and import the clips we had recorded in the filming stage. It also gave a wide range of filters which we used to help create the desired effect on our music video. 

On the magazine advert and the digipak we used similar lighting and shots to create a link between our ancillary products. In the production of the digipak and the magazine advert we used Photoshop after drawing up several designs by hand. Photoshop allowed us to play with the different designs that we had each come up with. When we finalized our design we then created a basic design on Photoshop. Photoshop is a very complex programme, however with time it can give extremely high quality products. Whilst designing the advert and digipak we tried different filters and text designs which we thought would suit the genre. In the end we went with a graffiti styled text font and added a small amount of cell-shading on the bricks of the wall. 
Again the internet was key in the research of this as it allowed me to see existing designs for magazine adverts and digipaks, which then gave me inspiration for my designs on my digipak.

Throughout the evaluation of the project I used iMessage, Facebook and Hotmail to get the music video and ancillary products out to friends and members of the target audience.
To answer the evaluation questions we were given, I used blogger, iMovie and YouTube to create different forms of media that I could then put onto my blog to create a multimedia way of answering the media questions.