Welcome to my blog, where I am working towards producing a music video accompanied by ancillary texts for the track It's Ok by Atomic Kitten

Thursday 20 March 2014

Evaluation Question 4 - Technologies

How Did You Use New Media Technologies In The Construction And Research, Planning and Evaluation Stages?
This evaluation question includes another 2 videos (in addition to the vodcast seen directly below):


QR Code and Viral Video
Viral Video
For our original production track 'When I Grow Up by The Pussycat Dolls', we developed the idea of a viral video, to increase and improve our audience interaction. Here is our promotional viral video below:



The viral video idea was to use the basic dance from the video (choreographed by ourselves) and get fans to send in their own clips of themselves performing the dance in the video or a dance of their choice to the chorus of the song. It was also an idea to get them to send in videos of themselves singing to the song. This idea gave us a platform for creating a fan-based video using the footage which fans could send in, and meant that the whole video and production was more creative and user-generated, involving willing fans in the success of the production. Brigid Cherry has written about how the development of the internet has encouraged fans to send in these user-generated, fan-based videos so as to develop productions further. We wanted build a relationship with our target audiences and we felt that by promoting this viral video, we did that.
Us choreographing a dance routine for the PCD video
   In relation to the user generated content, we can also argue that we reflected the web 2.0 theory by doing this. This theory, coined by Tim O'Reilly, states that the web is increasingly becoming user-generated as audiences can now easily contribute to the production of texts as a result of digitisation. We feel that the idea of getting fans to send in videos of themselves dancing to the same song allowed our target audiences to become involved and, particularly with the primary audience, makes them want to watch other videos and listen to other Pussycat Dolls tracks. Gauntlett argues that the divide between the audience and producer input is slowly disappearing too, as a result of convergence. His argument can also be reflected in our video, and links together with the web 2.0 concept denoted in our production. This is because he is arguing that the audience and producer are 'becoming one', with both beginning to offer creative input into the success and releases of new texts, which is important as this is a major element which contributes towards building a strong relationship with the audience and mass market. As producers, we have taken on board our audience feedback and ideas an have incorporated them into our video, which is arguably emphasising this decreasing gap between roles.
   Although we didn't actually carry this through into our new and final production for 'It's OK - Atomic Kitten', we still feel that by initially doing this, we have added to the audience interaction element of our production as a whole. On our target audiences, it has the effect of intriguing them and making them feel as though they want to watch the video repeatedly, perhaps to learn the dance, and become involved in the process of production. This is important as it creates a connection and relationship between the audience and ourselves, and so it makes them feel as though they have a say, and can easily influence our decisions.
   By doing this, we have increased our use of technology by creating extra videos on Final Cut Pro X, whilst also nicely linking the 3 texts together. If the video intrigues and involves the audience, then they will be more likely to want to research our production to discover more information about the viral video and to enjoy the digipak and mag ads, as well as learning about how we have progressed and the stages at which we're at.

QR Code
Our QR code
One of the major features which we used on our digipak and mag ads was a QR code. We used it on our teaser mag ads especially, as we wanted to anchor the use of Barthes' concept of narrative enigma. The use of the QR code and the lack of writing intrigues the audience more, making them more likely to want to scan the code to discover what the ad is actually advertising. It provides an interactive link to our groups Twitter page, which was achievable through the development of digitisation. Having it link straight to our Twitter page keeps our fans and target audiences updated on our progress, whilst also proving links to our other texts.
our twitter page

   We also used it on our digipak, for some of the same purposes. Narrative enigma wasn't used in our digipak, as it needed to advertise the groups comeback, but we still included it so that the fans who bought the digipak can also have access to a quick and easy link to our Twitter, to find out about the groups comeback and to see what else may have been happening.

   As well as talking about convergence, Jenkins also spoke about a cultural shift, with society increasingly becoming a 'participatory culture'. By including a QR code in both of our ancillary texts, we have supported this view as it allows our audiences to gain easy access to our Twitter page and from there they can find out more information about the viral video, as well as our progress and other texts. This meant that they knew where and how to send us their videos, therefore enabling them to 'participate' in the final production of our promotional package.

   Here is a short clip demonstrating how our QR code works. Poppy is scanning the code using her smartphone, and it instantly comes up with a link to the MKTP Productions Twitter page. As mentioned previously, the increase in digitisation has allowed smartphones to cope with this kind of technology, and in our increasingly materialistic society, a wide number of people are using smart phones, making our QR code available to a mass market.



Research & Planning
Blogger
Blogger has played an essential role in displaying the development of our final products. The blog allows us to write posts to keep our work updated, and it's easy to to embed images, screenshots and audio to visually support any text. Adding links and embed codes to text paragraphs also helped us to back up points, as it directly links readers to the website or video that we may be referring to, making posts generally read-easy. Having an individual blog means that as well as collaborating as a group, you can also showcase your individual research in a way that you choose, whether it be in vodcast or text form. It is an interactive and useful website which can be viewed or accessed by anyone which helps to further promote our work to a wider audience. The use of links lists also made it easier to navigate the blog, encouraging people to browse through the posts, as it appears organised and thorough, and is more appealing to the audience for browsing. Because we can create it ourselves and directly interact with other users, the website reflects the Web 2.0 theory, stating that we as users collaborate and define the internet in ways which we choose, leading to a user generated web. It reflects this concept through the ability to comment on posts and leave feedback and to create links leading to any other website that you wish. 


YouTube 
For research purposes, we used YouTube to study existing music videos by the group themselves, as well as genre specific and general music videos, to gain a better understanding of the typical and common music video conventions. We found YouTube to be extremely useful, as we could always find what we needed from a variety of sources all based on one website. This website was also user friendly, and allowed us to gain feedback directly and instantly. We added tags to some of our videos too, to make the videos more widely available to a wider audience, in the hope of receiving more feedback and constructive criticism on rough cuts.

Divshare
Divshare was one of the websites that we used to transfer documents onto our blogs that needed to be uploaded in the correct format. The website allowed us to upload almost any type of file that we needed onto our blogs and gave a professional effective finish once posted onto our blogs. When we used it for word documents, there were no real issues and it worked with ease, but when we tried to upload an audio file, it didn't always work as easy and problems would always occur. Because of these reoccurring problems with audio files, we often used Podomatic instead.

Podomatic 
After struggles with Divshare, we settled upon using Podomatic. This website proved to be much easier to navigate and work, and because it is specifically designed for transferring audio files, we suffered no problems. We used it mainly for uploading our podcasts onto our blogs, which we found useful for ourselves as the blog holders as well as users, as it added an extra element to the blog and meant that there we not many large paragraphs of text to read through, and helped to build a relationship with the audience, as it made them feel more involved in our work.

Fan Forums and Websites
Using fan forums has enabled us to directly ask our target audience and the Atomic Kitten fan base questions about the group and proved very useful in gaining extra knowledge about our target audience. Fan forums tend to be interactive meaning you can post your material into the forum for fans to view, and we found this element of these websites very useful in the sense that we could post rough cuts and sample videos and receive feedback from the other users.

Gmail
We chose to use Gmail for sending emails as it is linked to Blogger and YouTube via our Google+ account, meaning we only needed to create one account for all these websites and we only needed this one account throughout our research and planning. We used this email service as a way of contacting the cast and the record label for consent to use the track as it is a fast, direct and professional service which made it easy for us to use.

Facebook 
We also used Facebook as a means of contacting each other, although it was only used for communication between the production group as we felt it was unprofessional to contact cast members in this way.
Our Instagram profile

Instagram 
To update people on our progress further, we posted photos to the photo sharing app Instagram.We posted photos of ourselves behind the scenes of editing and filming, so that fans can follow our work and keep up to date with our progress. You can add tags to the photos, similar to the use of tags on YouTube, so that when other users search those tags your photo will appear. This feature makes the photos more available to other users, which will in turn hopefully widen our audience and increase the number of views. As well as adding tags, the ability to like and comment on photos makes the service more interactive as we can directly interact with our audience. In the past few years, Instagram has become a more widely recognised app, being used by both celebrities and ordinary people from around the world, and so we felt that it would be good to create an account and we can easily contact and update both our primary  and secondary audience.


Twitter 
Twitter is a universally used social networking site, which meant there was a great opportunity fro audience feedback from people across the world and promoting our production to a wider audience. Similar to on YouTube and Instagram, we used hashtags to link and spread our work. Using Twitter has been easy and useful, because many people use it and we have been able to quickly and easily promote our work.






Magazine Websites 
As part of our research for the magazine ad, we searched on the internet for previous Atomic Kitten group and individual advertisements to get ideas for ours. We also researched where they have appeared and discovered that they have mostly appeared in many teen magazines like Now and Look. As well as this, they have also appeared on FHM front covers, which relates to and attracts the secondary male audience. We then searched publication figures for the sales of these magazines towards each age groups, so that we had a clear idea of which magazine our advertisements would succeed the most in. Research was extensive for this, as there were many things that would come up in the search which weren't relevant.

Construction & Exhibition
HD Camera 
For filming our video and taking pictures for our mag ads and digipak, we used a HD Canon LEGRIA HF R36 video camera, so that the material was of the best quality for our budget. These cameras are reasonably priced, so they're affordable and easily accessible and they are now more widely used since the process of digitisation, and are becoming easier to navigate. We had no problem with this camera on shoots, providing that the batteries were always fully charged before hand.

USBs and SD Cards 
We used USB devices to easily transfer files between each other and computers at home and the macs at school. The HD camera required an SD card for storing the files when filming, and to transfer this footage onto the computers ready for editing, we used an SD card reader.

Final Cut Pro x
Final Cut Pro X was the software that we used for creating our video. It has a wide range of effects, titles and editing tools which we used to shape our video into almost exactly how we wanted it. One of the main effects that we used throughout the video was layering, which was one of the more complicated techniques to complete, as we had to make sure that the opacity of the shots were just right, and that the layering blended well with the underlying shot, so as to maintain the continuity of the editing. Another effect which we used on more than one occasion was the split screen, as it offered an alternative to layering whilst still showing more than one shot at a time, and also helped to portray the characters' emotion and thoughts effectively. Because we have used this software before, our skills and knowledge have been greatly enhanced and we have been able to use more effects and tools than we have done previously, because we have become more familiar with its navigation and the outcomes of all the possible choices. However, there were still some tools that required outside help from classmates and online tutorials as we couldn't work them ourselves or they weren't achieving what we wanted. In some cases, we had to re-think sections of the video and edit them according to what we could carry out rather than what we wanted to achieve at the end. This software is becoming more frequently used by major film producers, as it offers a massive variety of effects and alternative transitions, to make videos more interesting and fun to watch.

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop was used for creating our Digipak and Magazine Advertisements. I had previously used Photoshop and so I was relatively familiar with the software, however I did need reminding on how to carry out the more complicated techniques. Once I has re-familiarised myself with the different tools and effects, I was able to begin editing our products and putting them all together, and our final products were completed to a high standard because of the capabilities of this software. Because I was already fairly familiar with this software, I didn't take me long to get started, however some members of our group were confused and overwhelmed by the tools available and so it took them longer to get used to navigating it. For this reason only, it may not be the most appropriate software to use for such major products if it is the users first time using it, as it can take a while to get used to.

YouTube 
As well as for research and planning, we used YouTube for production and exhibition. The website provided us with a platform to upload rough cuts, sample footage, audience feedback and vodcasts, which we could then embed onto our blogs. YouTube also links to Final Cut Pro, as we could export our videos off of Final Cut Pro straight onto our YouTube profiles, which proved very time efficient. John McMuria analysed content on YouTube and discovered that the most frequently watched videos involved white middle class and that minorities do not tend to be recognised as much. After researching his findings, we decided to promote our work on other platforms as well as YouTube, to make sure that our video was reaching people of all ages, gender, ethnicities and religions.

Evaluation
Blogger 
We used Blogger for our evaluations as well as research and planning. The use of links lists made finding previous research to anchor points made in our answers much more convenient and less time consuming. We have also created our evaluation questions on Blogger, using both text form and embedding videos and other types of files, which ties in all of our work completed over the past few months.

Final Cut Pro 
Final Cut Pro was used again for vodcasts to be included in our evaluation questions. We recorded ourselves speaking and then dropped this into a new project, before adding screenshots and titles, so that viewers can easily follow the points being made. Because there is an inbuilt record tool, it made it easier for us to establish these videos and we have been using it for many other video that we have created and so it was simple and quick to put together.

VLC Media Player
To include short clips in our evaluation vodcasts, we used the VLC Media Player. This software was pre-installed into the macs that we work on so all we needed to do was to open it up and press record. This proved to be very useful as it added an extra visual element into the vodcast rather than straight images and it can visually demonstrate points being made, making it easier to follow for the viewer.

Screen Capture
Screen capture has been an essential tool for our evaluation questions. You can download it off one of many sites online and as soon as it has downloaded it is ready for use. You open up the screen or image that you want to screenshot, then you simply open up the application and capture the region of the screen that you need. Screenshots have been essential for all the vodcasts that we have created, but for the evaluation questions they're even more important as we needed to be able to clear back up our points. Taking screenshots as we developed our products proved to be very useful and less time consuming, as we already had them when it came to needing them.



Prezi
To add an alternative visual and interactive element to our evaluation questions, we used the online presentation website 'Prezi'. This website allows you to create an interactive presentation, where you can state and expand as many discussion points as you wish. You can then create a path, which follows the text in a chronological order, so that you can present it in an orderly and clear fashion. Once you have created an account, you can create as many presentations as you wish, and they are relatively simple to navigate, depending on the amount of text. This website is another example of an online service which reflects the Web 2.0 concept, as it is majorly user generated, and also has to option to share with others so that they can expand and develop the presentation, forming a collaboration. We only used this website for a section in Question 1 however, as it can be fairly time consuming if you're creating a large presentation, and if there is too much text in one presentation, creating the presentation can become rather complicated and it can be easy to mix up the path which it will follow when being presented. Despite this, it provided an extra technology for us to use which overall proved to work very well.

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