How did you use media technologies in the research, planning and construction or your media product?

Research involvedAs soon as I found out what our project was about I automatically used Google to help with the process and typed “hip-hop”. Many different things came up that all helped us have a better understanding of what to do for our project. I then used my own knowledge of rap music and typed many different popular rap artists in the Google and looked at what came up. From Tupac to lil-Wayne to Eminem.

After this I typed various modern day rap songs into Google to see what is popular and what is not by looking at the comment sections. People who had meanings in song generally had much higher rating then people who just rapped about “nonsense”.

All this research eventually led us to finding our artist (Question999). We found him through a site called unsigned artists, he has a Facebook and MySpace page that we could listen to some of his music on and even has some songs already up on YouTube.

Tupac’s song ‘Dear Mama’ a song about his mum, was very well received having 27,508 likes and only 310 dislikes.

While nicki minaj’s song ‘Stupid Hoe’ a title which is self explanatory had 255,669 likes and 552,562 dislikes .

People care about meanings of songs

Technologies used in the Construction of the Music video

We used many different technologies when creating our music video but the main thing we used was a digital camera we used for recording. We used a heavy amount of different angles and views, we zoomed in and out of shots, panned certain areas. We used a tripod to help us record some of the shots as it is a much more stable resource to use to record. We also used the digital camera to take still photos of the artist and scenery that was used for the back and front cover of our CD case.

A tripod

On the days we filmed we had a digital camera and a tripod and some spare batteries and tape encase our film ran out. We repeated several scenes over and over to get different angles on them and to keep the variety fresh, the tripod help accomplish this. Other than that we did not really need any more technologies to create the music video, we did however obviously use the computer to help us edit our music video and edit different scenes together.

Editing filming clips into a finished media product (Music video)

We used something called ‘Final cut Pro’(which is an editing programme on apple computers) to help up edit our music video. After about a day of messing around with the programme I found it was very easy to get used to and was easy to navigate through without much hassle. We first had to go through all our footage and decide what is good and what was bad the good scenes we recorded we embedded and started to download to our PC while the other footage that was not so good or not needed was deleted and not put into our final product.

Something that was very evident in our filming was that sometimes the lyrics were not in sync with the song. This is probably what took the most time to get right in the editing stages of our video once we knew what we were using. This was difficult because we had to time it just right to make sure the song fitted with the video or else it would look unprofessional and look like very bad editing.

During our whole process of editing we found out how to fade scenes in and out to add a different effect/dimension to our work and we incorporated this in a couple of our scenes throughout our music video. Some scenes were also quick shots to go with the beat and lyrics of the song.

Technologies involved in the CD CoverWe had a choice of different programmes we could use to create our CD cover. We could either use adobe Photoshop which is very popular for creating magazines and CD covers or we could use In-design which is also very popular for the same type of things. I decided to use In-design as I find it easier to navigate through and more easier to understand. I was able too use more functions and more variety with in-design then I could with Photoshop.

Most of the photos we took that needed editing were quite dark and needed more light added to them. Some pictures we took were also blurry and we could fix the pixels and make it look more clearer.

Photoshop has more advanced settings which I found out later on after I created my CD cover and although it was a shame I did not use it. We decided to go with another member of our groups front cover as we felt it fitted the theme more and overall looked better.