Evaluation - question 4

Evaluation - question 3

Evaluation - question 2

Evaluation - question 1

Evaluation outline

When looking at the evaluation stage of our coursework, we decided that we would work as a group and develop the answers together. We looked at different ways in which we could use new technologies to create a vary of responses, and we decided to use keynote on the Mac. Keynote is a programme which is much like Microsoft Powerpoint on a computer. We decided by using Keynote for one of our questions (which we decided would work more efficient with question 2 - effectiveness of ancillary products) as it is very interactive, and although there is reading to be done, it is not just in an essay style - making it more active for the audience. We have also decided that for a different question, we will use the Mac to record me and my fellow peers discussing our production in terms of the question, meaning that the audience do not have to sit there and read constantly. However, we will put screen grabs on top of us speaking when it is relevant, so that the audience will not just be watching a group of us speaking - which we understand will be very boring for the audience. We also discussed having a typed up response to a question, with many screen grabs, however we are not sure about this as we understand it will be a boring way for our audience to receive our answers to our evaluation.

Ancillary Texts

We decided to change our digipack, rather than stick to our original ideas. For example, for the front cover we decided to put the male infront of the brick wall which is in the shots of the female and male both lip syncing the chorus near the end of our video. Also, because of difficulties of the room in which we filmed in (not being able to fit everything we wanted in the shot), we decided that for the inside picture we were not going to use the picture of the male in his room, but instead get a picture of the male & female facing eachother. We decided that this worked very effectively, and we are pleased with the result.

Final Production

Final Video

Due to some technical difficulties it has not been possible for us to upload our video, however we will get this sorted within the next day and have the video working fully on our blogs.

Ancillary Products

Poster:

Digipack:

Final Cut

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We decided to use Final Cut for our media production, on the shots which can be seen here. We decided to layer these shots, so that we had one ontop of the other; however this proved to be very difficult and ended up changing our whole production by compressing the shots and becoming slightly closer. This meant that our establishing shot now had half of the writing cut off. However, after speaking with Mike we realised that the writing at the start of music videos is not a convention of music videos, but instead the broadcaster's individual input - therefore we decided that it does not actually matter whether the writing is cut off, and as it was too late to delete the writing completely, we had to keep it on. However, we did manage to layer the two shots, after realising that it was in fact easier than we had first anticipated, all we had to do was right click the shot and click "overlay". Therefore we have now managed to layer our shots, and our production is completely finished - along with ancillary texts.

Poster & Digipack

We had many difficulties when trying to create our ancillary products, as we were unable to use our chosen texts on many different programmes; however we were able to use them on Microsoft programmes. Therefore we decided to create our poster on Microsoft Publisher, which worked very effectively and we were very impressed with the outcome, we included the websites that our chosen song would be available from, and a review from NME which rated it 4 stars. We used these conventions for our poster.

Our Digipack proved to be much more difficult, as it would not work on publisher, so we had to use Microsoft Word, somehow we managed to pull it off without reducing the quality of the pictures, and we included the conventions such as including the executive producer (and other companies involved with the production of our video, digipack and poster) in small font on the reverse side of the digipack. We also made sure we included a barcode on our digipack, to create a sense of verisimilitude.

Overall we were very impressed with our ancillary products as we had to improvise with the programming due to our audience feedback and the most popular fonts. We were not expecting such a good result from the Microsoft programmes, and these will be uploaded very soon.

February

When looking at my blog it is noticeable to see that there are no posts which have been made within February. This is due to the fact that we have been creating our ancillary products, editing our piece and filming the final shots needed. This has taken up the majority of our time meaning that there have not been many things to update on. However, we have now recorded all of our shots that we need, and after uploading these onto the Mac we will be able to see if that the shots we have recorded are enough, and if not it still enables us some time to develop our ideas and film some extra shots.

Editing

When looking at our stop-frame-animation shots I decided that I should explain how we actually achieved having the four of the same males within one shot. We started off by filming the green screen shots, and having the male move over one and a half steps away from where he was standing the shot before. This meant that when we started to edit these shots we could easily make the male look like he is stood next to himself. We green screened the male onto our chosen background so it looked like this:















After we had done this we saved it, and opened it up within the same project, which meant that we could put a new green screen shot over the top. So it now looked like this:















We then repeated the previous step until we had the four males so they gradually added onto the end. Our final shot looked like this:













Overall we were very happy with how this turned out, as we were unsure as to how the final result would look. We edited the contrast and brightness of the shots because his jeans change slightly (which can be seen in the above screen grab) so now our shots looked very realistic and it is almost impossible to tell that we have used the greenscreen effect. The final result can be seen on our final video when everything has finished being edited.

13/01/11

Today we have arranged to start producing our digipack as we have now finished editing the stop-frame-animation shots and filming extra shots (such as greenscreen shots), therefore we are going to use our lesson time today to take the photos of the male outside, the shots of the objects on the table and possibly the photo of the park if we have enough time to achieve this. We will then take the photo of the male sat in his bedroom during the day that we will film the scenes in which he is in his bedroom. Therefore - if everything goes to plan - our digipack will almost be finished after todays lesson.

Lighting experiment

When we were filming our green screen shots, we decided that we should experiment with lighting as we were unsure as to which ways would cause more shadows, or more lighting on the actual screen rather than the male. During this video you can see that we had used the same background (which will also be the background for our final piece as the sky is very dull and negative - creating a negative feel to the male) for all of the shots, but we have used different shots in which the male exits the shot via the left which will also feature in our production. We decided after looking at these one after another on this video that if we do not use the overhead lighting, then the two side lights appear stronger and affect the whole shot - resulting in too much light being attracted to the sides of the green screen and making the purpose of the green screen effect less effective. Therefore we decided we must use the overhead lighting to stop this effect happening. When looking at the two side lights, we tried different positions of the lighting. For example, if you look at the image you can see that there were 2 different positions for each side camera. We mixed these combinations and tried them all to see which one was most effective. For example, we used the Side Lighting A at point 1 whilst Side Lighting B was at point 1 also, we then changed it so that Side Lighting A stayed at point 1, but Side Lighting B was now at point 2. We then did the opposite of this, so there was a total of 4 combinations when regarding the side lighting. We decided on putting Side Lighting A at point 1 and Side Lighting B at point 2 as we found that it did not create a shadow when the male exited the shot and it also meant that the male did not look too discoloured from the 'Oh me, Oh my' shots either. There was also the issue that with too much lighting on the shots, the male sometimes turned translucent and we could see through his arms and shoulders. We then decided to mess around with effects on the Mac and we lowered the contrast levels which effected our short green screen lighting experiment as he was no longer translucent, and the colours were much more vivid. Therefore we believe that this experiment was extremely beneficial as it meant that we could get the best out of our green screen shots and it enabled us to use the green screen effect extremely effectively.

Another way that the shadows could effect our piece is by them occurring because of the actual green screen. For example, if the fabric is not crease-free then there is an issue of shadowing happening because of the fabric itself. However, whilst exploring the Mac we found out that we can crop green screen shots so that only part of the green screen shot is shown. For example, looking at the screen grab you can see that by moving the four circular points you can cut out the parts that you do not want. For example, (referring back to our original green screen experiment) we had the top corner which had shadows and did not 'green screen' well. However, we now have the ability to cut these errors out of our production, therefore if a part of the shot has not worked as well as we had hoped and the male doesn't go near that section we can cut it out and make it disappear.

Greenscreen

Whilst experimenting with editing, we managed to find a way to layer the green screen shots on top of one another, creating the effect that there were four of the same person, within the same clothing etc. However, because of the way we had originally filmed these green screen shots, it means that we must re-film these shots having the male move over a few paces after each one so that we do not have the issue of the closest male blocking the view of the furthest one. Therefore we decided we will use our lesson time today (11/01/11) and our study period before this lesson to film these shots.

How we are using our time

At the moment we are using our lesson time by editing our piece, so that we will not end up wasting our time with our stop-frame-animation shots, which take up valuable time. We have decided that we will film in 2 weeks time; however we will not waste our time up until then as we will be focusing on these shots, making sure that the placement of many shots are in the right position. For example, when on the iMac (looking at the pictures you can see this demonstrated) some shots (e.g A) takes up the whole of the screen,whereas some other shots (e.g. B) had two black bars across the top and bottom of the shots, making it seem smaller and the shots were more squashed up. Therefore we had to crop all of the shots to make them the same size (as they are meant to seem as though an object is just appearing e.g a pencil). Therefore, it made it much more difficult and time-consuming so we decided to finish the editing for these shots now, rather than when we are in a rush.