Evaluation Question 4 - How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

New media technologies have been used in all of our processes; planning, production and post production. We have used technologies such as Web 2.0 in our web design, marketing and audience feedback, as well as lighting and sound tech in the studio we filmed in.

While planning, I drew the character designs that would eventually come to life on screen. For the initial design of Pandora, the lead singer, I used iScribble, a multi user online real time drawing website. This allowed me to get feedback from my fellow artists before finalising the design. Already, I was able to start shaping the designs towards our target audience, as many of the users of iScribble are females aged 13-20, with the other users being males of the same age range.

For the character designs of the other three band members, I used Paint Tool SAI, an extremely easy to use drawing program, along side my drawing tablet, a Promethean ActivTablet, which uses Wacom technology to operate (i.e, a magnet in the tip to influence the position of the cursor). This allowed for a more precise drawing, although since it was an initial design, I didn't clean up the left over lines, which lead to the messy half finished look. Despite this, it worked well as a design and although our final costume didn't end up looking like it due to actor changes, it paved the way towards the final design.

Here is the finished website. We created this website with WIX, a free Flash website creator. Initially, using this website was somewhat challenging, due to the nature of master pages and trying to place pictures so that they didn't show up on every page. Eventually, I mastered the interface and was editing the website with ease, adding twitter feeds and galleries. We have linked to most of the popular social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. With the prevalence of smartphones in modern society, we have also created a mobile website.

On the topic of galleries, every shot in our gallery was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS5. Since we were shooting on a black background, and our actors were also wearing black, it caused us no end of trouble attempting to isolate them from the black. We managed to cut them out using the polygonal lasso and fix it up with the eraser. One of the more recent additions to Photoshop is the ContentAware function, which takes information from the image to fix a spot with the spot healing tool, for example, a blemish or something that needs to be fixed. It was essential to the quality of our edited photos and is very useful.

When editing our video, we used Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to do so. This was an upgrade from my AS project, with which we used CS3. CS5 has a new additional features to CS3, but is overall the same. Despite this, it seems to run faster and has the option to stream HD video while capturing, which was nice, as we got to review our footage before we started editing it, meaning that we had some time to plan how it was going to come together. This is notable as HD video isn't usually viewable while capturing.

James our cameraman!

Our music video was filmed entirely on a Sony HVR V1E HD camera. When filming, there was a manual focus instead of an automatic focus (this was an option, but we decided to use the manual for focus pulls). When I was filming the circling seance shot, I had trouble keeping the camera focused and stable, especially when I started changing levels, from high to low. Despite this, quite a few of the seance shots were used in the final video, because they were quite energetic compared to shots from the same session.

For our audience feedback, we created both a focus group to show the video on the projector and an online survey to gather audience feedback from a more global standpoint. With the increased usage of internet over the years, clicking the link to a survey and filling it in takes no longer than 5 minutes, which allows us to gather data quicker and more efficiently than previously.

Also used was the increasingly popular Twitter website, on which I posted the link to the music video  and the online survey above. The trending nature of Twitter will allow for a viral transmission of our music video around the internet, leading to a huge amount of word of mouth and thus, succeeding in a viral marketing campaign.