Evaluation Question 4

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

From the early 1890s, when three men came together to start one of the biggest developments that would soon engulf the world; projecting a series of still images simultaneously to a live performance; to a modern era in which the technology has helped reform the way we see and use moving images and sound together to create a piece of art. The modern world has given us the benefits of the latest technology to give us the best possible ways of producing a music video, benefits that people in the 1800s couldn't possibly have wished it didn't come sooner.

With this being said I will now move on and discuss the ways that technology has helped us in every stage of our music video. Like all music videos, they require great research and planning. For this we had the help of the greatest advantage of the modern day; the Internet. We also had the help of the already existing music videos, and audios.

At the beginning of the year we each thought of a number of possibilities of what song we should interpret into a music video, but because we all had different tastes in music we decided to compromise. For this to work we looked into each other musical history; Simon and Sarah who are both Rock, and Heavy Metal fans; me being the complete opposite with a taste for R&B, found a common interest in 'Love The Way You Lie' because at the time of its release I, myself was interested already; Simon liked the aspects of creating a video to the song, and Sarah liked the lyrical aspects of it; as well as Simon's 'fan-ship' of Eminem during Primary/Secondary School. So moving on, we were able to use the Internet to inspire us, and to use as a research basis of coming up with ideas. For example, we used 'YouTube' a broadcasting website in which people can post their videos online, a lot of which are music video; just for the sake of naming one, 'Jason Derulo - Fight For You'. By looking at other music videos we were able to think of numerous ideas and ways that we could approach the production. The original version of 'Love The Way You Lie' gave one clear theme, which was domestic violence, so we stayed with this theme and thought of something that can be very stereotypical and commonly thought of, but not shown (I will explain this my post, in which I will discuss the mise-en-scene and representations given). When it came to planning, as its been said I came up with a brief about a vision that I saw in what could be our first scene, other than this, we looked, in terms of research and planning, we started looking at star theory, including that of Eminem, we also went into greater depths of analysing music videos, using Goodwins theory, and Craig Davies model of analysis.

As I've said in a post, some of the equipment that were involved in the processes of constructing our video involved the uses of DSLRs and tripods as well as a number of other pieces of 'production' eqipment; we also had the use of Mac Pro's, and Final Cut for the post production stages of our music video. This is what takes us into the modern world with the main advantage of this being we get instant feedback from our cameras, and we get to piece together the video digitally, meaning we need not worry too much about mistakes. Here are some examples of us piecing together the music video.

Using Final Cut Pro to create a music video required patience and was time consuming, this is because while it is easy enough to match cut the scenes, we had to make sure that the footage remained in sync with the lip movements, and the beat of the song. We also made use of our cinematography skills, because the video played around with time quite a lot, we had scenes that represented the past, present, and (arguable) the future. When it came to the 'Past' scenes we needed to create a feeling and look that suggested that it was set in the past, so we tinted the video, desaturated it, and blackened and unfocused the edges of the frame to create this scene of the past. Going back, we were able to obtain more accurate lip sync by miming to the actual song, to do this we needed something flexible, easy to move, and accessible, so we used my HTC Desire Android phone. Compare to the 20th Century where the performer would have to perform live, you can now, more popularly uses, mime to the song, without the need to transport different equipment from place to place.

Instant feedback and digital enhancements ment that we were able to evaluate our video as time went on, in one instance we were looking through the footage (one example is in the pictures above) and found that some of it wasn't our strongest, this was due to the performers or the fact that we thought that it made our video resemble the original. For example in this image we filmed in the Bury fields next to a wind farm, because of the fields use, it resembled the field in the original, so instead we decided to film the 'artist' in a much more darker alley way surrounded by tall, used buildings.