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

At the beginning of the project, before we were given our song to create a music video, we did a lot of research into genre and music. We watched lots of music videos on Youtube in order to learn about genre conventions and for inspiration, writing analysis on how camera shots, angles and mise en scene were used in order to be congruent with the song and genre type,whilst also creating certain representations. I also watched a lot of music channels such as Scuzz, Kerrang and NME on sky to do further research, get more ideas and understand more stereotypical camera shots and mise en scene that are used in music videos.
When putting all of our ideas together, we made a short film which talked about what we planned to do, including setting, concept and props so that we could show we were organised and had a good idea.
We then story boarded our music video, creating a step by step guide of what we wanted to film and the manor in which we planned to do so. We took photos of these story boards and uploaded them to our blog on 'blogger' which we had to set up as a group in order to record our progress in our media project.
After this we started filming on our school's HD cameras scenes which we wished to use in our video, going to places such as the woods and Matthew's garage, using features such as zoom.
During the filming aspect of our project, we used iMovie on the Macs at school to edit our footage together, using features such as the 'old film' effect on our performance shots; brightening and increasing the exposure on certain parts; adding text over the film; cropping the size of the framing and creating a four way split screen my importing and exporting cropped clips.
To add the song over the footage, we used youtube to find the song and then used a youtube audio converter (www.video2mp3.net) to transform it to MP3 format which then enabled us to use it in iMovie.
Before we started our ancillary task, we had to do some research on real CD covers and advertisement posters on Google so along with looking at and analysing ones in class, we made a powerpoint of CD covers and analysed them on each slide; inserting images of the original covers, text boxes, arrows and animations. For my digi-pak and poster, I used my own 10MP digital camera to take photos of the band, instruments and settings. I used features such as flash and zoom whilst I was in the garage and taking photos of the instruments because I wanted them to be close ups and because it was quite dark inside, I needed the flash to enhance the lighting. Once I had gotten all of my images, I uploaded them to the Mac and used Photoshop to edit them in order to use them for my ancillary tasks. I only used simplistic tools such as adding text and editing contrast and brightness because I didn't want to complicate the photos or touch them up too much because I wanted them to look quite low budget which is relative to the indie genre. Though by brightening them and increasing the contrast, I was able to make them look brighter and more colourful which not only made the masks eye catching (something I wanted to do so that you could draw a relation between the music video and ancillary task) but again made it conform to stereotypical indie conventions.