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

throughout our project we used a variety of different technologies and programmes to help develop and challenge ideas for our music video, print products and also research. The research consisted me of finding out the typical conventions of an indie pop genre, and what we would need to include within our product to make it appeal as this type of genre and also to the target audience of the indie pop genre. So we looked at various different artists and also bands to see what were the typical conventions within their music videos, which allowed us to plan easier as we knew what codes and conventions we had to include and to develop ideas further, and found that nature was a vital part of this genre of music which developed our ideas in locations and setting for the music video. eg. beach/fields. which then allowed us to plan our storyboard of the narrative. when filming the storyboard allowed to get the shots we needed and planned but also on the spot if we saw shots that worked well the fact we had two different cameras helped us get the extra shots we thought we could use. When introducing the idea of having the red balloon against the black and white coloured shots we practised the editing process of the colouring effect by using matte, on previously shots we had in a preliminary task, however we found the wind in the shots made it harder for us to get the colour accurate and we needed to use a higher quality programme to develop this idea to a professional standard, so by using premier we got James to use the shots from the beach to editing the colouring of the balloon step by step. Even though it was very time consuming but by using the editing process going frame by frame it created a much more professional looking effect other than matte.

we used photoshop to help the us for the album cover, to get the same effect of the 

photoshop

using the magic wand the balloon was highlighted by pressing the alt button down

then clicked refine edge 

we made the balloon less harsh around the edges by using the feathering tool, and made sure the balloons were equally even. Then we were able to change the colour of the balloon to a much more brighter red but still made the colour natural so it didnt look too cartoon like. 

We then went on image > adjustments > Hue and saturation to change the colour.

then the lighting, saturation and hue of the colouring was changed to make sure we got the best outcome of the red balloon, making it look as natural as we could

this was the final outcome which we used for both the album cover and poster 

To get the original effect for our album cover we used the app 'instagram' this allowed us to play around with different effects that looked best for our album cover, we used the colouring of 'early bird' which was the effect we continued through within our digi-pak and back cover to show a continuous link throughout the print products.

 

 

By using the different programmes and ranging our technology we were able to develop our original ideas in different ways to see which would be the best outcome, this has definitely improved the finalised print products and also our music video as we developed our knowledge and techniques using the editing programme premiere from our previous AS project, by making the editing more clean cut and run more with the music and actions on the screen which was a criticism in our last project. The red balloon has showed how we have developed our skills more as a group, and making our initial idea come to life and shows how we have grown into the skills of using this editing programme to create a more technical effect in the music video and also in photoshop, which previously in our AS project this technical and more higher standard of editing wasn't seen.