Evaluation Question 4

On the stage of research and planning I utilised many different forms of media to create my blog as it is, and to also help influence the work that I produced, one of the platforms I used was Tumblr, In my opinion Tumblr was a very useful platform when it came to the aspects of design, as you type in a generalisation of what you’re interested in looking for and a large variety of GIFs and pictures come up. I was searching for bands that would be relative to mine and around 90% of the content that arose were fan-made, I believe this is a very good source of influence for poster designs, album designs, as the colours and the way in which each design is done, there is a lot of careful consideration to each one. Also as hashtags are used to display the pictures, I uploaded images of my band to further promote myself as other users are able to share the content I have uploaded. Also on my tumblr profile I had the slogan of the band which was “Witness the Rebirth”, which was also used in other ways to promote the band. #WTR

This is also the reason as to why I used instagram, as you can search for content and this will aid in the promotion of my band, I made a series of images that would state when the music video was due to be released and posted them on instragram, this was in order to build moral and popularity before it was released, I also held a competition where people would share an image on their profile in the chance to win merchandise from my band.

I’ve used SoundCloud to upload teasers of my song to, where people would be able to listen to parts of the song before the entire video was released, although SoundCloud doesn’t allow video as it’s an audio only website, I was allowed to further endure the mystery of the song and video.

This project was a solo project done by me but I also had a lot of help from other people, because taking on a task like this completely by myself would have been stressful and challenging, I used the social media of Facebook to keep in contact with other people to help organise events to take place such as filming, as I required people to be in my project and for someone to aid me in using the camera.

The hardware that I used was:

Canon XA25 as it was an advanced HD camera to get a crisp and clear picture, I also used boxed lighting to apply and change the brightness of each shot, and for backup lighting I also used phone cameras, the reason I chose to use these cameras wasn’t due to me running out of lighting equipment, it was because the lights that are used in phones are actually small floodlights, as I was not able to get a hole of floodlighting the phones were an ideal choice.

To edit together the opening I downloaded Adobe After Effects, I imported my footage and used helpful tutorials online on the Adobe website in order to learn how to use the program effectively, this was how I was able to place the text and make it fit nicely with the smoke. For the entirety of the project I switched to Sony Vegas to edit, as I found this a lot easier than other software as I’d previously used it. Sony Vegas allowed beat marks which aided in the editing process, as well as my footage having an entire playthrough via each clip where all I had to do was place one over the other on the program, which made the editing faster than expected. After the editing process I uploaded my footage to YouTube, I chose to use YouTube over websites such as Vimeo and Flickr due to the popularity of YouTube, which would help my music video be seen more and reach the public eye better, as the general majority of the public are familiar with YouTube. YouTube also contains compressed links where you can

share YouTube videos to facebook and other websites with mere clicks.

I created a survey by using SurveyMonkey to get responses on what people thought of my music video, I then sent this out via facebook to people who I felt would be responsible and willing to answer it for me, I then compiled the results.

To create the digipak and the poster I used Adobe Photoshop, this is due to because I am also a graphics student and I am very familiar with this program, I find it easy and entertaining to play around on photoshop and make things to the best of my ability.