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

In creating, researching, planning and evaluating my promo package, I used many new but also existing technologies. To create my piece to a professional standard, I had to use professional software and hardware. The programs and tools I used to create a promo package (that would be seen in the industry), were that which are used in the industry. To film my music video I used a ‘Sony Handy-Cam’

 and tripod 

then edited on an Apple Mac book. 

These two pieces of hardware were the main components in creating and uploading my footage. To edit the footage, I used ‘prosumer’ (professional consumer) technology. The software I used was iMovie, 

allowing me to edit the footage into reasonable and useful clips. To match the genre and representation of junk star kids, I used similar editing techniques that are used in professional videos within the same genre. The black and white effect was inspired from a ‘Scorcher’ video - 

which also made our video look more professional as it created a grey over lay as it was added to a white room looking shot, created by our green screen.

To research what conventions I had to include in my own promo package, I used a number of websites. For videos to deconstruct I used youtube allowing me to search every video I wanted to find.

my second tool for research was Blogspot .

 This allowed me to upload deconstructions and general research for feedback and future reference.
When planning my music video, I could go of gone two ways, either old school pen and paper story boarding, or just take a camera and film some shots I had in my mind from deconstructions of other videos. I chose the second and took preliminary shots to see what we could achieve. We then took the footage and viewed/discarded what we had and created a ruff storyboard of what would work best. We then went out and re-filmed final footage. To film this we used two cameras, one for the outdoor footage (Sony handycam) and the second was for the green screen (Sony HD handycam). The reason we used these to different cameras was firstly because of the number of standard cameras the 15 students needed which meant the one HD camera had to be kept in school. We were able to then use the HD camera because we filmed with the green screen behind us.

 Although we only used the video cameras for filming, my separate products in my promo package had photographs of my artist; these were taken from my music video as screen shots.

. To create these stills I had to screen grab a suitable still from my video and then take it into Photoshop for editing. This is where I used tools such as threshold, desaturation and brightness/contrast. I then was able to use these images on both my magazine and digi-pack, which kept a sense of continuity in itself. After adding the pictures to the background of the digi-pack. I continued to use Photoshop to add text about the date of realise and information on track/track listing.

 I followed the same principle when creating my magazine advert, using Photoshop to add the date of realise and track name. 

To edit my footage to a finished standard, I used iMovie. This was because it allowed me to upload my footage from the cameras onto the Mac and then cut the clips to place them into a suitable order. Once I had the structure of my clips, and when they were ‘in sync’ with my music I could add effects such as ‘black and white’ and also ‘negative’.

Not only did we use new media techniques for creation, we also used them when evaluating our promo package. To realise the success of our video in terms of how it matched the genre and conventions of similar videos, we uploaded our videos onto Youtube. The reason we used Youtube and also Facebook is because they are two user based sites that belong to web 2.0 and are examples of the ‘global village’ theory, which is the principle of everyone being able to contact one another just as in a village. Youtube has the capability to allow other Youtube users to leave comments on uploaded videos; it also allowed me to find out what countries had viewed my final piece. Facebook was similar for usefulness in terms of feedback as it allowed my ‘friends’ to leave comments and constructive criticism.
Due to the development in technology in the past 5 years, this whole project, creating a promo package including a music video, DVD cover and a magazine advert was made easier and more enjoyable than it would have been 5 years ago. This was because the amount of professional equipment we had to use was incredible, both software and hardware, ranging from Apple Mac, Sony HD video recorder, Tripod, professional editing software and the utilization of the internet.