Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Tom Wiles 9201: Final Production and Evaluation

Video:

Digipak:



Advert:



Evaluation Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Evaluation Question 2: How effective is the combination your main product and ancillary products?


Evaluation Question 3: What did we learn from our audience feedback?

 

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

Throughout the project, we produced a collaborative e-portfolio by utilizing web 2.0, in particular the website www.blogger.com. We used this website in a number of ways, fundamentally to combine both individual posts and group posts to show progression throughout. 
Using Web 2.0 made this process a lot quicker, often giving us more lesson time to work on our concept or continue to edit via Premiere Elements or Photoshop aspects of the promotional campaign. 
Having each post available on Blogger meant reviewing each piece of work was also quicker and easier to navigate, really helping the organization of each member of our group. Furthermore, when navigating through the posts, the use of visual evidence was convenient and helped me to illustrate each point I was making, this in turn made each step of the project clear and any updates we had come across.  The image above shows the navigation page on blogger, clearly listing all posts in order of date, stating who published each post and its title, improving communication and organization throughout the project.

Visual evidence was vital during the research stage, where description and analyzing different promotional products was a key factor. Without the use of visual evidence, the text would have been excessively long and uninteresting, an example of this was the ability to embed videos from Youtube and presentations via Prezi.com. 
 This is an example of this, taken from my technical analysis post, showing how helpful the multimedia website was during analysis and research.







Another feature Blogger offers which I utilised, was the ability to  comment on my group members posts, acting as research, this allowed me not only to get feedback from teachers on how to improve my work, but also allowed me to tell my group members which aspects of each post I liked and could therefore incorporate into our own work, for example the comment shown below.


To carry out research we used Survey Monkey which was useful in a number of ways. Principally, the templates provided by the website are easy and simple to understand meaning the construction of the surveys were quick, being used after completing our pitch and to gather responses for the evaluation. The use of Survey Monkey shows progression from AS as we had the ability to send the survey to a larger proportion of people from a range of demographics, eliminating bias in the responses and reaching more people than just classmates (which we did for AS). This is an example of Web 2.0 as it is an online survey company with responses sent online, showing progression from AS as we only gave handouts.

Furthermore the responses from Survey Monkey were already analysed and showed which answers were selected most, this was true for the closed questions, not the open ones. An example of this is shown to the left, providing the answers for which filming techniques people would liked to have seen in our video, we then took these answers into consideration before constructing our video.
This was also shown in our evaluation for responses for question 3, helping us to decide which part of the promotional campaign people liked most and why as well as the weaknesses and the understanding of our video narrative. 



 To show further progression, we also filmed some interviews as visual evidence of peoples real life views, allowing for a more detailed response with a lot more content for us to analyse, we compiled this information into a video, shown below:

When shooting we used HD cameras, in particular the Canon EOS 600D which we fitted onto a stabilizer to give the smooth motion in many of the shots in the video. We were particularly pleased with the quality of the clips after adding the black and white filter on them in Premiere Elements, this was because the lighting in the shots were always of a high quality and many of the smooth movements that went with this really made the shots visually effective; the lighting was also of high quality in the images taken for the digipak and advert, such as the sun shining down on the two children next to the tree on the advert and the well lit picture of the artist on the digipak, with the well toned shadows in the background. Some of my favourite shots were from the bedrooom scene at the start of the video purely due to how the lighting came out after editing, an example is shown to the right.





I conducted some practice shots before we started filming to make sure the quality was correct, I then posted my findings on the blog, this helped as we were assured that the camera was capable of what style we wanted to represent.




There were few challenges that occurred during the project, however the major challenge occurred after the first shoot, taking place at Harry's house filming the bedroom scenes. When reviewing the footage we realised that due to insufficient lighting in the room, most of the footage had come out blurry and dark. The location itself was also very small making it hard to move around with the camera. To overcome this, we organised a re-shoot taking place in my room instead, this location had plenty of room for camera movements as well as provided the lighting from the windows that gave these scenes a fairly emotional tone.
 
We also had some issues with the stabilizer, it was often hard to keep stable making shots shaky and less effective, to overcome this I practiced frequently with the equipment to make sure I knew how to stabilize the camera and in the most time efficient way. To the right are some images from the shoot in the bedroom, as you can see from the top image there was little space next to the bed to capture and review footage. The bottom image shows me struggling to use the stabilizer initially.


To edit the video, I used Adobe Premiere Elements 9.0, there were various processes and methods I used to edit the video. 
One of the major processes was to review all of our footage, mainly coming from the Bedgebury shoot which was the bulk of our video. I positioned clips in the timeline in a certain way, I made sure to always relate the cutting rate of the video to the pace of the song. I started the video slowly, showing the sad timeline of the 1 brother, then gradually started to incorporate clips of the brothers when they were together, both young and older, using clips of the brother alone juxtaposed to clips of the two brothers in the same location when young. To add the after effects, I went to the edit toolbar and selected the 'colour pass' effect, shown in the picture above. I added this to all clips of the older brother alone and by going to properties, I altered the similarity of this effect to look right with the lighting, which was different in different locations. 

To edit the clips in colour, we exported the video and added it into after effects, using the 'scissor', cut tool to break up all the clips that were in colour, then adding an oval vignette effect to give the clips the look that they are memories and from the past.

One of my main tasks was to produce the 'fades' used in our video, in which the two brothers would be seen together but the brother who has died slowly fades away out of the shot. To do this I overlapped two of the same shots (shown in the picture by the red line going through the two blue clips), one with both brothers and one with only one brother. I would use the zoom tool to make sure that the scale and positioning of the camera in both clips was exactly the same, if not, I would alter the scale and positioning by accessing the motion toolbar in properties and moving one clip ever so slightly until both clips looked the same. 

I would then add key frames to one of the clips, one frame at the start of the clip and one towards the end. At this first keyframe I would make sure the opacity of the clip containing the brother was at 100% so that he is clearly visible, and at the end key frame I would bring this opacity to 0%, this gave the effect that the brother slowly fades out of shot, representing that he is gone. The picture to the right shows the opacity and colour pass toolbars, to the right of this is the two key frames of the clips, the red line represents the part of the clip I have paused it at, in between these two key frames, therefore giving a half faded effect.

With some of the fades I would also change the colour as the brother fades, to do this I did the exact same process but used the 'colour pass' effect instead of the opacity tool.
I also frequently used the time stretch tool, in which I would often alter the speeds of shots to match the speed of the following clip. Often, if the movement of the camera in one clip was the opposite to that in the next clip, I would click the reverse speed button to put a clip into reverse and make the movements seem similar. The picture below is a screenshot from one of the clips I reversed.



We used Adobe Photoshop to edit the images used in our printwork. To create our final advertisement we used a range of colour corrections to make the image more eye-catching as well as have a colourful visual style like many of Jack Garratt's EP's like 'Chemical' and 'Breathe Life'. We first decided on the font, taking inspiration from Jack Garratt's print work and using programmes like fontspring.com to find a font similar. To get the style of the 'A's' in the artists name, we used simple rectangular selection tools to select and delete part of the A. 
To give the black shadow effect on the artist name we used tools 'drop shadow' and 'inner glow' and adjusted the size of the shadow. Moving on to the colouring used in the advert, the mixture of red, black and green we added a new layer to the image, primarily making the image black and white by going to the enhance tool and selecting convert to black and white, using the sliders to decide how light or dark to make this layer.

We then added two gradient mixes of colour, choosing red and green as we thought it was eye-catching and contrasted with the black and white well. We chose to add this colour scheme across all of our printwork as we thought it had connotations of the binary between light and dark and their resulting connotations (sadness and hapiness) which was also used in the video, constructing a cohesive band image. We also reused the typography process on the digipak, most obviously using it for the artists name and album name on the front cover, we also used it for the track listing on the back pane of the digipak. We decided to list the tracks down the side of the headphones, we did this by writing the tracks in the same font size and dragging and positioning them onto the picture, making sure the gaps between the tracks were the same using and scale and sizing tools. We also altered the hue and saturation of this image so that the red and green colouring was more visable as well as the shadows created by the headphones.




The middle panes of the digipak were fairly simple, we used the same colour scheme and gradient mix however this time we had to make the image lighter. Making the picture lighter gave the shadow effect on the floor of the picture, almost with a sort of line going down the middle of the path. This was made simple by utilising the hue and saturation tool. Using the colour balance and density tools, we were able to split the picture between red and green, doing this because as it is a middle panel there will be a fold in the middle, making one side red and one side green upon opening the digipak.

 

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