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

Technology has been large part of the whole process, from social media, to new digital technology, it has been crucial in construction, research and planning and the evaluation

Construction

WIX

We used a lot of social media on wix - we had links to tumblr, facebook, twitter, instagram and pinterest as well as a live twitter feed, facebook comments and a 'tweet/like/pin' feature on several items

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We used a service called mailchimp to enable users of our website to actually sign up for a newsletter, the above gif demonstrates how signing up works

For the lighting, we wanted to create a grungey but still colourful and interesting set up, one interesting influence was 'Arcade Fire's' video for 'Here Comes the Night Time' which featured very similar lighting - we liked the blue and red colours and the fairy lights in the background and took influence from this, however we set up the lights so as not to hit us since we only wanted to colour our backgrounds

In wix while most functions for creating buttons and pages were simple and obvious however we had to learn how to use widgets, for example going through twitter to create a personalised user widget.

CAMERA

We used the Canon 5D Mark II for the focus pull shot at the beginning of our video as it had a much closer zoom than the V1E which allowed us to create a shallow focus effect

We used the Sony HVR V1E for most of our video. To create an infinite white effect in the hospital, we used a low aperture - about f2.5 so the depth of field was low and the white background blended together.

We planned to use a GoPro for some of the dancer scenes. Although we did not use this footage in the end, we downloaded the GoPro app on our phones, allowing us to see what we were filming on our phones.



 This is a video using shots from each set up to show how we graded to get the desired effect from the original shot. While mostly this was not new, just using ProcAmp and 3-Way Colour Corrector, for Kai we had to use an 'Echo' which changed in different sections of the song and we had to adjust the intensity and delay of the echo to achieve the effects above.

This video contains annotations on how I used 'After Effects' to make the dancer disappear in some shots

Research and Planning

We had a facebook message going throughout the project so that we could plan and communicate as a group at all times, at home or out on our mobiles

Technical presentation from aliced1996

This is the technical presentation, created as a plan for the technology used on the shoots for the music video

For the album cover, we used Adobe Photoshop. While we did not use any very complicated effects, we did use the 'Skin Smoother Action' to make ourselves look polished and a bit unreal. It is basically an airbrush for which you select how much you want to change from the original and then simply brush over skin. One problem with this was that it lost the intensity of some shadows, which we had to use the burn tool to put back in.

Evaluation

For the evaluation, I used several technologies which were new to me. Prezi for one was very useful as it allows viewer to navigate around more freely than slideshare - so they can just click on parts they want to read. I also used imgflip.com to create gifs, which are smaller and simpler than videos but more informative than photos. Survey monkey was also incredibly useful since we posted it after the screening.