Question 3-Jack Simpson

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

Hardware

27 inch Imac Intel Core 2 Duo

The Imac was the centre of our work. Because of the unique OSX operating system, the computer is the industry standard for professional programs.In our case we used it for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and Quark express in conjuction with our HDD's which we stored all our work on.

JVC GY-HM100 Pro HD

We used the JVC GY-HM100 video camera to capture all of our shots for the music video. A state of the art piece of equipment, it was really a pleasure to use.It felt very easy and basic to get to grips with. At the same time,due to its features and abilities it clearly had more depth to its options, that I feel we didn't exploit.That being said we didnt need to play around with lots of different settings to get good quality film,which I think was great. We used 16GB SD cards to record our footage on which was a must because the quality and size of the footage.These were inserted into the dual SD card slots on the cameras base.

Software

Stacked clips along with markers and bass track

Clips and markers together

Razor Tool

All of our footage filmed with the JVC Pro HD was edited in Final Cut Pro. We were accustomed to the basics of the program like stacking clips etc but we also utilized techniques like the marker and razor tools.Markers were key in editing our video to the beat, without them our video would definitely not have had the same impact. The key to how to use markers was in the name,they were literally used to mark parts of the track and match them to our video clips,as you can see in the screen shots above.

The razor tool was also key in our editing.It helped us to precisely cut up longer clips into smaller sections,which we could then place in the right areas.We used this in combination with the markers to create really smooth sequences that played to the beat very well.

Editing photos in Photoshop

Positioning the edited photos in relation to the panels

Adding text in Quark

I used Photoshop elements 4.0 and QuarkXPress to make my ancillary products. Photoshop was used mainly to manipulate existing photos and screenshots. For example I cut out parts of a photo using the Polygonal Lasso Tool.Then I arranged them using the select tool.That was how I created the two inside panels.

Cutting an area out in Photoshop

Quark Xpress was used mainly for creating and manipulating the text on my digipak and advertisement. Quark handles fonts and text much better than photoshop which is why I used Quark. for this.The combination of the two programs worked really well.

Websites

The above websites were key to our research,development of work and for archiving our steps towards making our music video and ancillary products.Blogger was the backbone of this, we all posted our research and planning here. Youtube was invaluable as it helped us to find influences and examples of music videos. Vimeo offered a unique High Definition quality that Youtube didn't, which is why it was used to host our video.It also offered password protection for our videos.