Evaluation Task 4
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Media technologies were an imperative part of the construction, research, planning as well as in the evaluation stages of my media products. In this “Evaluation Task” I will be breaking down how I used these media technologies in the different stages of the creation of my media products; I will begin by explaining how I did this with first my Album artwork, second my Website and lastly my Music video:
Album:
To begin with, bellow I have embedded my album artwork, firstly the front cover, next the inside cover 1, inside cover 2 and finally the back cover, along with that I have also attached the album artwork booklet photos:
Research (Pre-Production)
For the planning of my album artwork I used several forms of media technology to try and get inspiration for it; In the research of other artist’s album artworks I mainly used three different platforms: Tumblr, iTunes and HNHH.
Tumblr: “Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website founded by David Karp and owned by Yahoo! Inc. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.” Tumblr allowed me to go through multiple blogs to be able to find thousands of different album artwork photo’s as to take inspiration from for the creation of my own, not only did it let me to look at actual artist album artwork but it also allowed me to look at users own content, album artworks which Tumblr users had created them selves. I would credit Tumblr with being the biggest inspiration for me when researching for my album artwork, on Tumblr I managed to find the two photos which gave me the idea for my original album artwork idea, those two photos can be seen bellow. Also embedded bellow is a screen recording of mine which depicts what it looks like to go on to Tumblr and look at other peoples content as well as there blogs. In the screen recording what I do is go on google and google Tumblr, next I click on the website which brings me to my Tumblr home page, then in Tumblr’s search engine I type in “Album artwork” which then brings me to a page which shows me the most recent Tumblr uploads about album artwork but it also shows me the links to blogs of people who make their own custom artwork, and I go onto one of them during the screen recording.
HNHH: “HotNewHipHop.com empowers artists by letting them showcase their music to real hip hop fans. Meanwhile, our members enjoy the latest and hottest in hip hop singles, mixtapes, videos and news. — The #1 source for the hottest hip-hop songs 2014, mixtapes, videos & news, updated daily”. HNHH allowed me to browse through the existing album artworks of hundreds of artists, more specifically mixtape artwork of HipHop genre artists. This was also a main source of inspiration for me because I was able to see what actual artists had done for their album artwork. Not only this but HNHH allowed me to view the top 100 mixtape of all time on their website so not only could I see other artist album artworks but I could also see what was a really successful album artwork. Bellow is a screen recording I made of what it is like to go onto HNHH, first I went into google and searched up “hot new hiphop”, then I clicked on the website which brought me to its homepage where I could view a bunch of mixtape and there artworks, but next if I went up to the top of the website I could click on the “top 100” where I could look at 100 most successful mixtapes on their website:
The third platform I used to get inspiration for my album artwork was simply iTunes. I went on my iTunes and looked through all the albums I had on my iTunes and I looked at their album artworks. The point of this to me was to see what was successful in my opinion, all the albums on my iTunes were albums that attracted me, therefore in my opinion were successful. Also I wanted my album artwork to be something that I liked, therefore what better way to get inspiration then to look at all the albums and album artworks that I like. Bellow is a screen recording of what it looks like to go onto my iTunes and what I did to see all the albums and their artworks. First I clicked on the iTunes application and then I clicked on “albums” which allowed me to look at all the album artworks and I could click on individual albums if I wanted to see the artwork in bigger:
Production
Post Production
Website:
Bellow is a screen recording of my website (so far) which was created on Wix:
Research/Planning (Pre-Production)
For the research and planning of my website I used media technologies in several ways. Firstly I began by comparing different artists websites. To do this I used screen recording technologies as to be able to get video’s of several different artist websites as to be able to re-watch them and to compare them. Two main websites which I compared, were Lil Durk’s website and Tyco’s website. To compare the two websites I used Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Adobe Media Encoder. I used Adobe Premiere pro as to be able to edit the screen recording footage of the two websites next to each other, in a way where it was easy to make a comparison between the two websites. I also used photoshop to create text bubbles which I then exported into png’s and imported in premiere pro as to be able to place these annotations over the screen recordings of the website so that I could clearly see what the similarities/differences were between the websites. I then used Adobe Media Encoder as to be able to export the Premiere Pro file into a MP4 file, so that I could upload it onto youtube so that I could access the video more easily as well as the rest of my group. Bellow is the website comparison video which I created as research as well as inspiration for my own website:
I also used WordPress.com as to do some research in the creation of a website. “WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it's probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.” I decided what better way to do research into the creation of a website, then make my own. I made a draft website for an artist called Travis Scott as to be able to practice creating websites, so using WordPress and its custom templates as well with photoshop to create the images which I imported into WordPress and put on the website, I decided to go with a infinity roll website which is where you there are no buttons it is just a scroll website, so the more you scroll the more you find out about the artist. I used screen recording technology to record this draft website I created and I have embedded the video of this website bellow:
Production
Post Production
Transcript: The post production of my website was very very simple but it still required new media technologies. The post production of the website is simply making the website open to the public. To achieve this I used wix.com. All I had to do was first go to wix.com, secondly I had to log in to my account so that I could access my website, and next I had to go onto my account and select my website and once I was on my website I clicked the preview button when I do this it opens a new tab with a preview of my website. An option then pops up on my screen which says “make your website go live now” and it also gives me the option of changing the URL of my website, I decide not to change my URL so I simply click on the GO button and Wix automatically publishes my website, so that anybody who knows the URL can view my website.
Music Video:
Bellow is a link to my music video which I created, it a music video for the song “Without U”, by Spooky Black. The video is uploaded on YouTube and is on my school’s YouTube channel:
Research/Planning (Pre-Production)
The research and planning of my music video was probably the biggest task I had to tackle this year, it took a lot of time to try and get all the research for this music video as to be able to make it come out perfect and exactly as I wanted it. Media Technologies were imperative to the research and planning of my music video, I used a whole bunch of different media technologies such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Media Encoder, YouTube, Blogger, Tumblr, Vimeo, and DSLR camera’s. When doing the basic first stages of of the research for my music video as to be able to get inspiration I used new media technologies platforms such as Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. I used Tumblr to visit blog’s and to look at photo’s which could give me ideas for my music video, it took a long time but I managed to curate a bunch of photo’s from Tumblr which gave me ideas for my music video; Bellow I have embedded a few photo’s which I found on Tumblr which gave me inspiration for my music video:
I used YouTube and Vimeo, as platforms to look at existing music video’s, when using YouTube, I could do several things to look at music video’s, the first thing I did was go onto my account and click on my liked video playlist which is a playlist of video’s I had liked in the past. Secondly I typed in artists, into the YouTube search bar such as G-Eazy, Kanye West and Travis Scott to look at what videos they had made, because all three of these artists have won awards for their music video’s so I watched them to take inspiration. Another thing I did was use “hashtag’s” which is where you type hashtags into the youtube search bar such as “music” & “hiphop” and it will show you a playlist of music video’s which are related to your search. I used Vimeo to look at music video’s as well. The first thing I did was go onto Vimeo and looked at my liked videos as I had done on YouTube, next I went on the StaffPick’s playlist on Vimeo, which is a playlist of video’s curated by the Vimeo Staff which they though were very good and by going through this playlist I managed to find several music video’s which I liked. Bellow I have embedded a few videos which fuelled my creativity and which influenced the outcome of my music video:
“Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was developed by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.” Blogger was instrumental to the research and planning of my music video, it allowed me to lay out all the planning of my music video in one easily accessible place which was also accessible by my group members so that if they ever had any questions about what was happening with the music video if they weren't there they could just check my blogger account. Bellow I have embedded a screen recording of my website so that you can see what it is like when I go to look back at something on my website:
I used DSLR camera’s as well as Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder, to create videos during the planing of my music video’s a lot. I used DSLR camera’s for several reasons, to take photos of my actors during the casting process, which can be seen bellow. I also used DSLR camera’s to take photo’s and video’s of rehearsals with our actors which can also be seen bellow. I used DSLR camera’s to also document parts of my planning and research process so that I could have it to look back at later, a good example of this is when we were pitching out music video idea’s to Luke, who is another media teacher in our school, so i filmed his response to our presentation with the DSLR camera and then used Adobe Premiere Pro, to edit the video so that it was more condensed and understandable and then I used Adobe Media Encoder to export the edited video to mp4 so that I could upload it to YouTube and then onto youtube so that me and my group could look back at the video easily and improve and change things according to his feedback, a video of the feedback from Luke which I filmed, edited and uploaded to YouTube is embedded bellow:
Production
Post Production
