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

Equipment - Canon 550D

Obviously, without a camera a music video is impossible. Luckily for us, Eoin had a Canon 550D and was able to borrow another one so we were able to use high quality cameras to film all our footage. An added benefit of the canons was that all our footage was saved onto memory cards so unlike last year, we were able to copy and paste large amounts of files without capturing. This meant that the time taken importing our footage was reduced massively, which we needed as we filmed over 150G worth of footage!

Lights - Strobe; 650 Watt Redhead lights; Neon Bulbs

Artificial lighting was only necessary for our performance. Natural, outdoor lighting proved to be excellent for the narrative filming, especially under the lens' of the canons. 
For the performance, however, we had to use a set of 3 650 watt Readhead lights and one work light. In total we had 3 performance shoots, and although our first shoot was over-exposed, it proved to be a learning curve and the second and during the second and third shoots the equipment proved invaluable. 
For the second section of our performance, we decided to use neon paint which meant that the lighting needed to change. We used 2 neon bulbs, one above the performance and another at the side. Without those bulbs the neon element would not have been possible and there would have been no progression to our performance. 

Web 2.0 - Youtube; Twitter; Facebook; Blogger; Google Maps; Wix

To advertise our product and to build a band identity, we utilised web 2.0, focusing on social networking sites as a huge percentage of our target audience of 15-25 year old males are frequent users of them. 
We created a Facebook page and a Twitter account, enabling fans to follow/subscribe to our updates, finding out information about upcoming gigs etc. We found it was a great promotional tool, for the creation of our product, but also the advertisement of our screening of all the music videos produced in our media class. We were able to create an event on facebook and invite our entire year. Over 100 people turned up, showing the power of social networking. 
We also used Youtube to upload the first edit of our music video, which meant that getting audience feedback was simple as the video was easy to access from any computer. Youtube was also where we uploaded our final music video:
OUR VIDEO ON YOUTUBE

My other main use of web 2.0 has been Blogger. As you can see this blog has made it incredibly easy to present ideas, thoughts, updates, photos and videos. It has been indispensable and saved a lot of time. Managing the blog and the presentation of the entire project has been simple, and last year's use of it meant that I had experience with it already so was able to use it much more fluidly and confidently. 

During location scouting, I used Google Maps to quickly find alleyways via the birds eye view then see whether the location and appearance was suitable for the video. Again, this saved us a lot of time and energy as our only other option would have been to physically go out looking which would have wasted time better spent on set dressing etc. 
Our website was created on Wix, a Flash website-building site. We were able to create a professional and dynamic website, catering to all our needs, in a reasonably short amount of time. However, we did come across some issues; see here for a post on Wix-gone-wrong.

Editing Software - Adobe CS5: Photoshop, Premiere Pro; Colour

Our group have used a number of Adobe CS5 softwares throughout the project.

Photoshop

We used Photoshop to edit all of our pictures for the website and album cover as well as the logo. 

A large amount of photos were needed for the website, and once I got used to using the software and learnt the shortcuts and tools I found that I was able to effectively transform a large amount of photos to look professional and to adhere to our intended image in a short amount of time.

As you can see here, the album cover photographs were completely re-worked on Photoshop to suit our intended appearance. We were able to colour-correct the photos as the lighting was different in each picture to create a sleek and consistent image.

Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro was the primary editing software for our video. We were able to initially cut down the original track by Pendulum to suit the brief and then add the visuals using the track and tools to edit the footage. We also used this software to start our colour-correction, but then moved onto a more advanced colour-correction software; Colour.