4. How did I use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Evaluation Q4 - How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning, and evaluation stage?

I relied heavily on a range of media technologies throughout all stages of my production. Different technologies, suited to a variety of tasks, were at my disposal throughout, of which I could take full advantage to produce the highest quality music video and accompanying texts possible.

For my research and planning phases, I have relied heavily on services provided by Google, one of the largest digital corporations in the world, who dominate much of the market for these services. Due to the nature of my coursework assessment, I was able to complete work both at home, and at my sixth form college. This required data transfers from one place to another, and while traditionally a USB memory stick would have been the clear solution for this problem, I opted to use Google Drive to solve this problem. Google Drive is an online cloud-hosting service, which enabled me to edit and store my files online, and access them whenever, wherever. Using Google Drive also eliminated any risk of data loss, which, for example, could be caused by losing possession of the USB drive. This service is also bundled with Google’s ‘office’ applications, including Google Docs. Google Docs is an online word processing application, and an alternative to Microsoft Word, which includes an array of advantageous features. One of these is that Docs constantly saves and updates your progress as you type, which is another means of preventing data loss. On top of this, files can be opened in Google Drive and edited in Google Docs, without having to switch application, as the services are all web-based. This is a comfortable and effective use of synergy, which greatly aided me, particularly in my research and planning stages.

I also used Google Forms during my research phase. Google Forms allows the user to create, share and analyse surveys. This was particularly useful for my audience research task, as the service allows me to receive the survey results as soon as it is completed. Forms was a very efficient way of gathering data from my audience, and it had the added benefit of being under the Google platform, where it is therefore tied to the same account as my documents and files on Google Drive.
During the research phase of production, I took advantage of yet another Google platform to allow me to analyse existing music videos, YouTube. YouTube is an online video hosting and sharing website. Popular internet traffic measuring site Alexa Internet ranks YouTube as the second most popular website in the world, and it is a rich source for video content. I used YouTube as it hosts almost every popular music video produced in history. This meant that I was able to pick and choose which existing music videos to analyse, and YouTube’s scrubbing feature meant that I could go through each video frame-by-frame to achieve close-up analysis. Finally I used the Google-owned website Blogger to host my blog posts. Blogger sorts by date so that I was able to create a cohesive blog with which to store my research and planning documents. The majority of my planning phase took place inside Blogger, as it has a word-processing environment for writing and publishing blog posts inside which I detailed my planning.

The construction phase of development required an entirely new range of technologies. The construction phase required that I create two print artefacts to accompany my production: a CD digipak for an album and a magazine advert for the album. I used a DSLR camera to take the photograph for my album artwork, which would also appear on the magazine advert. I used no lighting manipulators, and instead relied on natural, midday lighting. These photographs were then transferred into Windows from the microSD card, after which I kept only the photographs that I believed were of good quality.
To craft my digipak and advert designs, I used the graphic-design website Canva. Canva is a free, web-based tool for graphic design solutions and features a simple interface for designing materials. This made it a suitable option for creating my digipak and advertisement. I did, however, only see Canva as a foundation for my design. It was always my intention that although I would start my digipak design on Canva, I would finish it on Adobe Photoshop. This was not the case for my magazine advert, however, as I believed that the advertisement should be more simple, elegant and design-focused, whereas my digipak required refinement and polish.
Adobe Photoshop is the world’s most popular solution for photo manipulation and it is no surprise why. The intricate tools presented in Photoshop allowed me to extend my initially basic digipak design into a polished, finished article. One such example is the Sketch filter in Photoshop. This allowed me to create an effect whereby it appears that an image has been drawn by hand onto paper, when in reality it was originally a photograph. Photoshop’s complex scaling and positioning tools also proved to be a great help when I began to insert the complete album lyrics into panels of my digipak. Such a task would have been monumentally difficult using Canva, and would only have been possible had I switched my design over to Photoshop.

I used another set of technologies in the filming and editing stages of construction, when my music video finally began to come to fruition. While I was provided Sony Handycam cameras by my sixth-form college, it was my view that using these for filming would be an inefficient choice, as they would not always be readily available to me, and this could disrupt my shooting schedule. Instead, I opted to use a camera that I would always have available to me; the camera built in to my phone. In particular, this was an iPhone 6S. On the popular camera quality measurement website DxOMark.com, the iPhone 6S’s camera was awarded a video score of 80, ranking it 13th on their table of all phone cameras (as of 2017). Around halfway through production, however, I changed the camera I was using, which proved to be an upgrade. I transferred from using an iPhone 6S to using an iPhone X. DxOMark.com gave the iPhone X a video score of 89, a great leap up from the 6S score. Rather than reshoot previous sequences, I elected to combine the footage shot from the two smartphones, as though there is a quality difference, they are both of high-enough quality whereby I thought reshoots would be unnecessary.
As both of the cameras that I used during production were not typical cameras and were in-fact smartphones, I required an external tripod mount. To solve this problem, I purchased Mudder’s ‘Universal Smartphone Tripod Adapter’ from Amazon.com. This purchase was inexpensive, delivered quickly and incredibly useful to my production. I also purchased the tripod itself from Amazon; in particular the AmazonBasics 60-inch Lightweight Tripod. This proved to be an efficient purchase, as aside from being a sturdy and useful tripod, its light weight also made it extremely portable, and therefore useful for carrying around while filming.
To transfer the video files from the iPhone to my computer, I used Apple’s USB-to-Lightning transfer cable.

The editing process began when I started filming. At this time, I set up my editing environment, so that I would be prepared for when I was ready to import my first batch of footage. The computer I used for editing was a 2017 MacBook Pro. My choice to use a notebook for editing, rather than a desktop computer, was based on the fact that I had the option of portability if I needed it, and that this computer was my main computer at home. The video-editing software that I settled on was a piece of free software named Hitfilm Express. This was an unconventional choice, considering that all of the computers in my sixth form had the much superior Adobe Premiere Pro installed on them. However, having considered this, I chose Hitfilm based on the notion that I wanted to be able to edit at home when I could, as this would allow me more time than what I would’ve been afforded at my sixth form. I could not install Adobe Premiere on my MacBook, though, as it has an astronomical price which I found unreasonable for an editing process that would last no more than a few months. Premiere does offer a free trial, however this only lasts for one week, and would also be very ineffective. Hitfilm Express then presented itself as the best alternative, as it was free, and I also had the benefit of having used the software in my free time in the past, meaning I was familiar with it’s interface.
I found that, upon importing my footage into Hitfilm Express, the footage was not compatible with the software. Upon researching online, I was made aware that the .mov file format used by iPhones is not compatible with the Hitfilm software, and I was required to convert the file format. This is where the software HandBrake came into play. HandBrake is used for converting files from one file format to another, and I was aware of it from online discussion. It proved to be a tedious process, importing every single video file I had shot, into HandBrake, and then exporting them. This was unfortunately a necessity, however.
Hitfilm contains an array of different tools to aid in my editing process. One such example of this is the masking tools, which allowed me to craft a unique transition in my music video, named a body wipe. This involves having a character walking across the frame, and then in post-production, masking out elements behind this character, so that the character’s movement instigates a wipe. To do this in Hitfilm, I first took my footage of my protagonist walking from the right of frame to the left and eventually out of frame. I then turned this shot into what Hitfilm calls a ‘Composite Shot’, which allows for most editing techniques to be applied. With the ‘Mask’ tool, I erased all of the elements behind the character. To make this an effective wipe, I used keyframing, and animated the motion of the mask, frame-by-frame, so that it would follow the character off screen. By the end of the shot, the character is out of frame, and the entire frame is transparent. When this composite shot was then returned to the editing sequence, I placed it on the track above the next shot. What this meant was that when when the elements behind the character are erased, the contents of the next shot bleed through. As the character walks further and further out of frame, more and more of the next shot is revealed, until a successful wipe is completed, and the two shots transition seamlessly.
I made use of other tools at my disposal with Hitfilm also. One such example is a pre-set colour grading effect called ‘auto colour’. This placed a simple colour grade on my footage, which I then manipulated for each shot by adjusting the red, green and blue colour components.
Hitfilm was used to its potential for everything I wished to achieve during the editing process, and proved very effective at delivering a fast, portable and free option for video editing, especially when compared with the expensive Adobe Premiere Pro.

Finally, during the evaluation phase of my work, I used many of the same technologies as stated before. My evaluation documents were initially written up on Google Docs. I used this as Google Drive has a range of intuitive formatting tools to aid in writing up essays, and has autosave features to prevent data loss. For my question 1 answer, I created a video essay that lasted approximately 10 minutes long. This video consisted of myself reading the initial essay I had written, edited over visuals that were relevant to the discussion. The audio was recorded in nine separate audio files, one for each paragraph. This was done using Apple’s QuickTime, a piece of media software that comes packaged with macOS. I used the built-in microphone found in the 2017 MacBook Pro. Each audio file was recorded, and then saved. Once all of the audio clips were imported into Hitfilm, I went through the video, and cut down any areas of the audio file where I had made a mistake, or left unnecessarily long breaks in speaking. From this, I had created the audio basis for my video essay. I relied heavily on the website www.converto.io throughout. This is an online service that allows downloads of YouTube videos. I used this to obtain short clips of existing music videos, along with real-world examples of transition use for my comparisons. I used Google Images to obtain images that I added for visual aid, such as a diagram representing linear storytelling. In terms of video-editing, my use of technology did not exceed simple dissolve and cut transitions, along with overlaying video tracks, and placing text over video. All of these features were available free with Hitfilm Express.
For my question 3 answer, I decided to create a slideshow, which I would then embed into my blog. I chose to do this, as I felt that with the number of charts that I had to display, which visualise my audience’s feedback, a slideshow would be a more efficient route to display these with text, than a written document. My audience feedback questionnaire was conducted on Google Docs, and I used the Windows application Snipping Tool to copy each of the response charts, which are automatically created by Google Forms. I then used Google Slides, an online slideshow service created by Google, to construct my answer. Google Slides offers almost identical features to Microsoft’s popular application Microsoft PowerPoint. However, I opted to go with Google Slides, as, much like other Google services, the application features auto-save features to prevent data loss, and is stored in my Google Drive alongside all of my other work. I also used Google Images to find images of the Google Forms logo and an image of Bill Gates, to be placed with a quote of his regarding the importance of feedback.
Once I had completed my slideshow, I had to find a way to embed it into my blog. Thankfully, Google Slides features an ‘embed’ feature, where I was able to get the auto-generated HTML code for the slideshow to be embedded seamlessly into my blog. The slideshow, as presented in my blog, moves to the next slide every 15 seconds, loops upon ending, and also features back and forward arrows for the viewer to interact with the slideshow themselves.