Preparing task 4 - explain how we used digital technologies in the construction and research

In A2 I learned how to use a variety of new technologies in a more creative way. I learned how to lip-synch my music video and use after effects to over-expose the white backdrop to eliminate the creases. By mastering the use of final cut pro I was able to use it more creatively and do faster cuts to the beat of the music.
In A2 I used online technologies to plan my music video and ancillary tasks in a much more sophisticated. I used online shopping to research and bye the costumes for the music video so that all the band members would have the same costumes.

 I used you-tube to research similar music videos such as Robert Palmer’s music video addicted to love.

I also used the internet tools such as Google to research similar bands to ours such as The Saturdays and Little Mix to find out how they were promoted and then use similar strategies to promote my band.

Saturdays website

Little Mix music video

I created a twitter account for Reportage (my band) and then put live twitter feeds from them on the website I created to promote it. I did this because media convergence is very important in our days to help the audience connect better with artists. Furthermore according to the media theorist Jenkins, audiences in the online age want to interact more with the artists. So by putting live twitter feeds in our website we are responding to the demands of the audience to interact better with our artist. Therefor the use of technology allowed me to connect better with my audience.

I learned to use Photoshop to create an interesting album cover. As Reportage is a girl band it is very important that all of the members of the band look very attractive; so I used Photoshop to manipulate their photo on the album cover to make them look even more attractive. The use of this software enabled me to further reach out to my target audience.



First draft of our album cover

 This is just the first draft of our album cover. In the final album cover I used tools to also manipulate the font using a tool called bevel and emboss, this gives the text a 3D feel which makes it more interesting then one used in this draft.

I used final cut pro to edit my music video in a sophisticated way. To make the editing process more fast I started by creating 5 bins and labelled them accordingly, Full makeup, Lipstick No makeup, Photo shoot, Close ups. In the 'Close ups bin' we put the shots that were of close ups of parts of the girls bodies where you could not see their heads (e.g. CU of shoes, hands...) and so it doesn't matter in what section of the music video they are, the names of the other sections are self-explanatory. Doing this truly helped us as our video is in a way separated in 3 parts and if we hadn't done this editing would have been an extremely annoying and long process. 



Using  final cut pro enabled me to work with different timelines which is very useful when editing a music video as you can keep all of you footage and just drag it and cut it so that the shot is the length that you need it to be without losing the lip-sink.

We used Wix to create our website. This online tool helps us to create a stronger link to our audience and allows them to get involved with our band as they can find out exactly what our band is doing on the go thanks to live twitter feeds and the fact that we post the latest news about the band on the home page of the website.

Our website

Latest news on our website

I also kept an online diary of my production using blogger, so that  I would be able to remember every single step it took me to produce my music video and ancillary tasks.

 

I think that all of the new technologies that were available to me enabled me to be much more creative with my product. Without them it would have been much more difficult to research, plan and create our products. I believe that all these new technologies give us more possibilities to be more creative with them.