Task 4 - A director's commentary on how i used new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages.

During the making of our music video we used many new media technologies. We used them extensively at all the five stages of the production including, research and development, planning, pre production, production, post production distribution and evaluation.
We decided to use new media technologies such as, blogger.com, youtube, slideshare, google and Wikipedia because they are available, easy to use and practical. Using these new media technologies are an easy free alternative of using old and unreliable resources such as pen and paper, and looking for hours in large books full of lots of information.Youtube is such an important website because many music artists strongly rely on it for getting there music out and heard. Many artists post their latest music videos and do video blogs of themselves talking to their fans. This is an extremely sufficient way of using youtube to advertise yourself and your music in order to get heard and noticed.

When we where first notified that we would be getting into groups and making a music video for our media work I instantly went onto the internet and started watching music videos for other bands and artists! I went onto youtube to watch these music videos as it is the most used, well known and reliable video sharing website. I looked at a broad range of different artists from country and folk to hip-hop and rap. I feel that it was important to look at a broad range of different music videos because I needed to get a feel of how music videos look and how they are made. This is when I began looking at the more indie and folky music videos and they really began to interest me. I started watching music videos from such bands and artists like Mumford and Sons, Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn. They all had a similar non-image quality, focusing very much on the music rather than a storyline of some sort. They where neither glamorous nor expensive looking and I really liked this factor. I decided to look up one of my favorite bands, Bon Iver on youtube to see what music videos they had. This is when I realised that they did not have any music videos made! I found this extremely interesting as most bands, no matter how small they are have music videos. This is when I decided that I would really like to do one of their songs, as we have nothing to steal ideas and inspiration from.

I also used Wikipedia to gain information about the band Bon Iver who we chose to use. Without Wikipedia I would not have been able to find out the bands record label which I needed to know in order to right a letter to them asking for permission to use their song. When I found out that their record label was ‘Jagwagwar’ I then went on google to find their website and get their headquarters email address. After obtaining this email address, I then used yet another new media technology of email to send ‘Jagwagwar’ our letter. Email is a great stress free and extremely fast way of sending information and letters as an alternative of post.

During the whole process of making this music video I have used Blogger.com to record and keep track of my process. This was a more efficient way to writing down notes because I used things such as posting links to Internet websites, posting photos and videos. If I had just simply written everything I could have easily lost it and also not been able to post links to websites that doing on blogger is so easy to view.

During our shoot we used more new media technology by using digital sony NX5 HD cameras. This is important because only recently has HD been introduced and people have started using it. HD stands for high definition and puts our videoin a much better quality allowing the audience to see everything well.

During the post production we again used new

media technology in order to edit it. We used an editing program for Mac called Final Cut Pro in order to cut and edit our video. We then used another program called After Effects in order to create the effect where our actress Lottie turns black and white and disappears in the end. Without these programs we would be shooting

our music video in film and using the extremely old fashioned process of literally ‘Cutting’ the frames and sticking them together in order to edit and cut our video into the right length.

In order to distribute and get out video out there and seen we used the website youtube that I talked about earlier. It is a very efficient way to distribute our music video because anyone can watch it and leave comments and feedback on our video. It is also very efficient because it we did not have this new media technology of youtube and the internet, we would literally have to have a little show of our music video getting random members of the audience to come in and watch our video on a small TV.