How did you use media Technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?

During our production we used technology in many different ways including Studio lights to create an eerie environment and a camera crane for interesting shots. We used a standard canon camera, the main ability this camera had was being able to manually focus and we used this in one of our scenes. It was also easy to use, and very versatile. The tripod we had along with it helped us to keep it still when filming, it also helped panning and tracking shots to be a lot smoother. We did have a problem with the camera once however when we attempted to film the doll breaking on the floor. We originally intended the doll to break in slow motion, however because of the low frames-per-second of the camera; we couldn’t slow the shot down as it appeared jittery.

We mainly used Final Cut Pro to do the video editing and Adobe Audition for audio editing, we used Final Cut Pro also for the visual effects, which we believed added to the atmosphere of the song. Final Cut Pro allowed us to speed up the timeline of the video to create the time-lapse effect.  Also to add to the dark, dreamlike, surreal atmosphere we used some other effects supplied by Final Cut Pro, Vignette was one effect, making the video de-saturated. Another effect used was blurring the corners to give the music video more of a cinematic feel. Bad Film was the final effect we used giving the overall mysterious, dreamlike effect. This effect also added to the hypnotic aspect of the music video we tried to create. Adobe Audition was used to edit the song, as we had the problem of the song being 4:30, so we had to cut out a minute of the song. We managed to do this in cutting the least important parts of the song while still trying to keep the song flowing and natural-sounding.

We used the studio in college with the aim of filming the scenes inside a dark room because that had all the studio lights and technology we needed along with blackout curtains to make sure the room was as dark as it can be. It also had a speaker that we used to play the song ‘Kid A’ through to make sure all our ideas fit the mood and atmosphere of the music. It also helped with the acting as then the music would have signalled our thought processes to match the music with acting.

For the CD Cover we used 2 programs, both Adobe packages, these were both illustrator and Photoshop. To achieve the 2 circles of text on the inner right side cover we used Illustrator. Photoshop was then used to create the cover art by collaborating different photos, typography and textures.

In order to research for our main project, we used safari on the Apple Mac’s, and from that we mainly looked at the website ‘Youtube’ for inspiration, looking at other music videos. This inspired our time-lapse idea mainly. Also to buy the dolls we used the website ‘Ebay’, these were then used as our main props.