-Intro

Modern media can consist of digital videos, blogs, social networks etc and is used in all aspects of life.

I decided to use a website to present all my work. By creating a website, I was able to keep all sections separate in order to navigate easily around the website. This also enabled me to develop my media skills and use a variety of creative ways to present my work.

-Research

The use of technology during the research stages was super important. Using Wix for the research stage was particularly effective because I was able to display all my findings in one organised, creative spot. Wix also gave my website a professional look which reflects real media music websites.

By being able to design my website the way I wanted, it gave me the opportunity to create the designs I had envisioned for the web design. This is due to there being such a wide variety of designs for backgrounds and layout options.

YouTube was a huge part of the research process. My initial research took place on here. This was by analysing music videos within the same genre, in order for me to gain more of an understanding on the codes and conventions of pop music videos. An example of a music video that I looked at was Style by Taylor Swift. By watching this, I knew to include lots of different locations and costumes in order to help the narrative of my video flow.  I also looked at different types of music videos such as narrative based, performance and conceptual so I was able to figure out what type best suited my genre and ideas that I already had.

Additionally, I also used YouTube to analyse previous A Level music videos, specifically ones that were of the same genre as mine, in an attempt to fully grasp what I should incorporate and possibly what to avoid. From this research, I decided to avoid using too many similar shots as it can become repetitive and almost boring.

YouTube videos could be simply embedded onto Wix which was incredibly useful because I was able to capture what I had researched onto my website easily. Personally, I also think having the video embedded onto my site looked much more professional, rather than having a hyperlink that took you to the YouTube website. Not only does it appear visually more appealing having the actual video on the website, it also enables you to read snippets of the text surrounding the video whilst watching it.

I also used Prezi (an online PowerPoint presentation creator) to display one of the research tasks. Although Prezi allows you to make creative PowerPoint's, the website has a tendency to easily crash therefore I found creating a simple presentation very time consuming, hence why I only used this website for one task. Another issue I had with Prezi was I had great difficulty embedding the PowerPoint onto my Wix website. I instead only have the hyperlink for the PowerPoint on the page with a screenshot of the opening slide of the presentation.

-Planning

During the planning process, one form of media that I used was the editing software; iMovie. The videos that I edited on this within the planning stages included; Initial ideas, audience feedback, final ideas, mise en scene, representation and animatic storyboard. iMovie is a simple editing software that allows me to import clips that I can easily cut together and then add transitions text and audio (background music) to the final video. By filming these videos, I was able to easily express my ideas at each stage of the planning process.

 All the videos that we created for the planning tasks were all filmed on my iPhone 6s. The camera quality on this phone is fairly good therefore I didn't feel the need to film all these videos on my camera (Canon). By filming on my phone also enabled it to be a quicker process as I either needed to simply airdrop the videos on my phone to my iPad to edit or just edit on my phone as iMovie is installed on both devices.

I decided to create the thumbnail for all of the videos in order for there to be a theme throughout. This was created on an app on my phone and iPad called Font Candy. For this, I simply took a screenshot from the video and added a title to the image making sure to use the same font, colour and as close to the same size as possible to keep them all consistent with one another.

All these videos mentioned above minus the animatic storyboard were uploaded to YouTube and then embedded onto Wix. This was a very simple and easy process.

We had problems uploading the animatic storyboard to YouTube due to copyright issues therefore we used Vimeo to upload our video onto. As well as YouTube, this was easy to use and navigate around.

-Production

All the video clips in the music video were all filmed on a Canon EOS 1300D. We wanted to make our video look as professional as we could, therefore by having good quality video shots throughout, this made this more convincing.  Accompanying this, we also used a tripod when filming several shots. This helped to stabilise the shots, again making it appear more professional. Incorporating a wide variety of camera shots and angles was also very important to us therefore when filming close up shots, we used a canon zoom lens in order to gain a very crisp clear shot.

During the editing stage, we used the editing software; Adobe premier pro. This software was more advanced than iMovie which we had previously used. As it was new software that we had never used before, it was important to do some research in order to gain the most out of it. Therefore we watched several YouTube video tutorials on different editing techniques that we wanted to incorporate into our final video.

-Ancillary

For the creation of the digipak and magazine advert, we used Adobe Photoshop. I have previously used Photoshop in the past so I already knew the basics, however watching YouTube tutorials helped as I was able to try out slightly more advanced tools. It is very easy to navigate around and offers a wide choice of tools that you can use to edit your images. Without Photoshop, I would of been a lot more restricted to what I could create possibly not allowing me to create the design I had in mind.

Instead of writing an analysis of our digipak ideas, we created another video. This meant we could talk more in depth about our designs and make it more of a discussion. This, like all our videos were filmed on an iPhone 6s, edited on iMovie, thumbnail created on Font Candy and then uploaded to YouTube.

-Evaluation

For the final stage; Evaluation, we decided to make a video for 2 of the questions. As we had previously made several of these type of videos for the planning and ancillary tasks, this was something we knew we could execute well. These were both filmed again on an iPhone 6s as the video quality is very clear and then edited on iMovie. The thumbnail again was created on Font Candy keeping the design of all the video's consistent and then uploaded onto YouTube, in order for us to easily embed them onto our Wix website.

Emaze was also used to display one our evaluation questions. This is another website designed to create presentations on. These presentations can look very professional and also allow you to be creative in the way you want to design it.

I used just Wix for this evaluation because I thought this would be the best way to display lots of information and images. However, I did consider using Prezi (an online PowerPoint creator) which I thought would be a more creative way of displaying this information but this was not made possible as I had continuous problems of the site crashing and not embedding onto my website.