Above is a image that I made in Photoshop. The image shows all the technologies used to create our music video, this includes both psychical and digital technologies.
The technologies in the picture above include...
- Blogger
- YouTube
- Canon 6D
- Macintosh (Final Cut Pro X/Neat Video)
- Camera Rig
- Steadicam
Camera - Canon 6D
The Canon 6D was the camera we used to record all the scenes seen within the music video. The camera was the most important piece of equipment as without it we would be unable to record the footage we needed. This is what we used during the construction stage of the project. The Canon 6D is a DLSR and that means we had the ability to change the frames per second (FPS) the camera recorded in as well as the resolution. This gave us more control over what and how we were recording and the varying FPS allowed us to record slow motion shots or slow down shots and keep them looking smooth. Additionally we were able to record in a higher resolution and as a result making our music video look more professional.Mac/Final Cut Pro X
We also had a Macintosh (Mac) that allowed use a piece of software called Final Cut Pro X. This was used during the construction stage of our project and was especially useful in the creation of our project. This is what we used to edit our final product and allowed us to add effects and edit the video in whatever way we wished. This was a key technology that we needed to create our video and without it we wouldn't have been able to make the narrative that can be seen within the final product. In Final Cut Pro X we both edited and manipulated the video we had shot. One of the key features of the software that helped was the ability to colour grade. Since we had filmed some shots in the day time and in the storyboard we had planned it to be at night we decided to colour grade the day time scenes into night time. We did this by masking around certain elements in the scene and colour grading them so it looked like the scene was happening at night. This made it easier for us as we didn't need to film late at night and therefore spend a longer time shooting the video. Additionally we used a plug-in called "Neat Video" that let us lessen the affect of noise within each of the shots making the final product look more professional.
Below is a video shows the same footage both before and after colour grading...
One of the pieces of physical technology we used during the construction stage of our product was camera equipment including both a shoulder rig and steadicam in order to get the shots we wanted for our video. The shoulder rig helped us to get steady shots and generally record. This is a much better method them recording using general hand-held camera as it makes it more steady and in some cases makes it easier to record. stable shots that include little movement such as pan. The shoulder rig was essential as it is a unique piece of equipment and the same effect could not be made with a tri-pod as movement is a lot harder when the camera is stationary. The steadicam was for taking stable shots when the camera would move and follow someone. An example of this includes the video below...
As evident from the video you can see that the camera follows Ben (the artist) and is stable. This same effect could not be done handheld and would be harder to perform with a shoulder rig.
Blogger and YouTube
Another piece of technology we used during all stages of the creation of video was both YouTube and Blogger. The stages these services especially helped me with was planning and evaluation stages of the projects.These are online websites that allow both me and my group to store and edit work. We mostly used Blogger to store our work so that none of it was lost and additionally it helped us organise our work as it was all in one place. It also allowed us to make slight changes to each others work such as a spell correction or change the wording of something. Something blogger also helped us to do was do work when outside of school since it is all stored online we were able to edit and create new work when at school and at home. YouTube also allowed us to store our work as we could upload it to the school YouTube channel. Additionally since YouTube and Blogger are both owned by Google we were able to embed videos from YouTube to Blogger and therefore make our blogs look more interesting and use videos to back-up our work.
