Evaluation Question 4 - Anna McConnell 7104

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

An example of manual focus and experimenting with depth of field from our music video

Here are examples of our group using the DSLR camera in action to film the shots of Megan that would ultimately used for lip-syncing. In addition to this, here is a video providing a behind the scenes insight into the process of choosing the typography and making adjustments to it in Photoshop.

Construction problems and how we overcame these issues

Electronic noise over our shots

Initially, when planning our music video, we assumed that the shots we would film in the glow in the dark party scene would be vibrant and clear, even though it was filmed in almost complete dark. However, when looking back at the footage, we recognized that the majority of the shots featured a significant amount of noise across the screen, causing the shots to look blurry and unprofessional. Despite this, we recognized that by speeding up the footage, the noise was hardly distinguishable whilst allowing the shots to still remain vibrant and dynamic.

Focusing the DSLR Camera

The focus function on our particular DSLR was significantly temperamental. Many of the pans and depth of field shots in the streets of central London we aimed to feature in our video had to be re-evaluated as, when attempting to focus in on a particular sign, the shot was intermittently blurry due to the autofocus turning off midway through filming. Due to time restraints, we could not spend an extensive period of time re-filming the same shot, consequently forcing us to keep moving location until we found the outdoor ping-pong table, which was ultimately a success to film.

Final Thoughts:
With more experience of the software and a longer time to work, we were able to take more creative risks with our editing; experimenting with different transitions and filters. We enhanced the vibrancy of the scenes at the neon party and God's Own Junkyard in order to make the scenes look visually enticing and make the colours more spectacular to watch. In order to keep the audience engaged and maintaining a sense of verisimilitude, we spent the majority of our time editing the lip-syncing, frame by frame, in order to sync the audio and visual lines seamlessly. This was perhaps the most vital part of the construction process of the music video as it played a huge role in determining how realistic and effective the end result of our music video was.